A New Man
by Steelbadger
Summary: Torn from his family and lost in an unfamiliar world Harry Potter will fight with all he has to return to them. He has to navigate self-absorbed geniuses, secretive government agencies, megalomaniacal Norse gods and a huge green rage monster if he is to find his home. Post-epilogue story.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** Hullo. So I wasn't going to be writing this week as I have deadlines and stuff (look for stuff to happen in a month or so once the craziness has settled down). But I had this idea and I had to get some words down.

What is this story? Well, as the category says it's a HP/Avengers crossover. It starts right at the end of the Deathly Hallows Epilogue. I'm not a fan of it but it actually plays into what I want to do really nicely so I'm gonna roll with it. Everything is completely HP canon until the start of this story. If you're worried about that then I will mention that the only canon pairing with significant screen time will be Harry/Ginny and then only as a driver to push Harry onwards. If you want spoilers then shoot me a message and I'll ruin the whole thing for you if you want (or, if you're reading this in the future and the fic is completed then just skip to the end first).

It runs from Iron Man through to whatever happens in Age of Ultron. I hope I've guessed right for the events there otherwise I'll have to go a long way off piste to make it work but it's fanfiction, that's what it's for. It will mostly follow the timeline in the movies and Harry will weave in and out of them as his actions demands. He also has a plot of his own that will be the primary thread and his reason for doing things.

None of my other stories are abandoned, I'm just very busy at the moment and only this was able to pull me from my conscientious procrastination.

Now, lets get going!

* * *

**A New Man**  
_By Steelbadger_

Chapter 1

* * *

_Harry's hand was still raised in farewell. _

"_He'll be alright," murmured Ginny._

_As Harry looked at her, he lowered his hand absentmindedly and touched the lightning scar on his forehead._

"_I know he will."_

_The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well._

He looked at Ginny and little Lily with a soft, happy smile when quite suddenly the world disappeared and was replaced by an unending black, filled with the roaring silence of eternity.

The silence faded and he became aware of something more. The voices of ghosts and shadows lingered at the very edge of his perception as he floated within the timeless void. Where was he? Where was Lily? What had happened to Ginny?

"I… worked… throu… alive!"

"Br… functional… amazing."

"Dim… ment… cess!"

He strained to hear the broken whispers that floated through his mind but they slipped beyond his perception like water. He could not grasp anything but the briefest of snippets and moments from their words. Then silence descended in his dark world and time seemed to stand still.

Finally, after what felt like an age and yet was probably mere moments he saw a distant light, a pinprick in the blackness. He willed himself towards it. How he moved through the empty and featureless void he did not know, he had no body nor even true tangible presence. He was nothing more than a collection of thoughts and memories, a cloud of self within the empty nothingness.

The pinprick resolved itself into something more that a mere point. He caught a glimpse of a room, a bed, a body before the light blinded his perception and a sense of weariness consumed him.

His eyes fluttered slowly open and the glare of bright lights made him hiss in pain as he squinted into the unfamiliar room. Slowly, so slowly, his eyes grew accustomed to the dazzling brightness of the single light set into the ceiling and he was able to take in his surroundings.

It was a small room, perhaps four meters square. The walls, floor and ceiling were all covered in featureless white tiles no larger than his hand. He was strapped to a simple and uncomfortable medical bed that lay along one wall of the room. In the far corner was a toilet set low to the floor, just as simple and stark as the rest of the room. The only other feature was in the opposite wall; a heavy steel door, densely riveted and with a small closed viewing hatch just below eye height.

It was a cell, though certainly more comfortable than most Harry knew. What had happened? He closed his eyes and tried to recall the events that had led to this moment. He had been on Platform 9¾ with his family, he had just seen Albus and James off to Hogwarts. He had been about to lift Lily into his arms and promise her pizza to get her mind off the disappearance of her brothers. There was nothing more, only the whispering darkness and broken words spoken at a great distance.

How long had he been here? Why had he been brought here? Where was here? His clothes had been taken from him, as had his emergency on-call Portkey. His wand was of course nowhere to be seen, no-one would allow an Auror their wand if they wanted to keep them locked up. Even without his wand he was not yet ready to panic. He was Harry Potter and he was far from helpless. The only possession of his that he'd been allowed to keep were his ever familiar glasses which rested gently on the bridge of his nose.

It was a bad situation, certainly, but he'd seen much worse and he was a fully trained Auror now. He brutally suppressed any feelings of welling panic and focused on the task at hand. The first thing he noticed was that there was no anti-Apparition jinx on his cell. That was an extremely puzzling mistake, but one that he would happily take advantage of.

He immediately tried to Apparate to one of the Auror panic rooms, the secure safe-houses set up specifically for situations where escape was the first priority. Tracking Apparition was no easy thing but it was possible. In situations like this standard procedure was to Apparate to a safehouse and sound the alarm from there.

But the attempt at Apparition failed painfully, the weight of distance fell heavily upon him and a headache told him that he had been taken much further than he'd expected. Harry could Apparate clear across the British Isles, if he was too far away for that then he had obviously been taken a long way from home indeed.

Perhaps eastern Europe? It was certainly beyond his abilities to Apparate clear across Europe and there had been growing discontent in those nations after their entrance into the muggle EU. Most muggle politics was irrelevant but the rapid modernization in those nations brought about by their inclusion in the EU saw them following the path already seen in western Europe 40 years ago.

Where he was was unimportant really, so long as he could get out. He fixed his mind on the hotel he and Ginny had visited years ago in Prague and tried again. The heavy hand of magic smacked him down again and through the now burning pain in his mind he realised he may not be able to escape that way.

He felt the prickle of sweat upon his brow when he realised he may be stuck here but he didn't struggle and he didn't panic. He needed to keep a clear head, this was what all those years of experience were for. If he had been taken what had happened to Ginny and Lily? He was confident that Ginny could take care of herself as she had always been an accomplished witch, it was Lily's fate that most concerned him. If the people who had kidnapped him had so much as touched a single hair on her head then he vowed that they would know the full fury of Harry Potter.

It had been many years since he or his family had been threatened. Under the leadership of Kingsley, and then later Percy Weasley, magical Britain had finally cast off the shackles of bigotry and backwards thought. It was no utopia of course, but Harry was confident in the belief that things were now firmly on the road to a bright future. When Lily left Hogwarts she would be entering a world almost unrecognisable when compared to the world Harry had stepped into.

The burning question was how could Harry and his department have missed an organisation with the pull to kidnap the hero of wizarding Britain from the middle of a busy crowd of parents? There was nothing on the threat matrix even close to that level of skill and resource. The few fringe groups scattered across backwards countries could not hope to achieve something like this.

He reached out with his magic to the bonds that held him fast to the bed and prodded them experimentally. They were not spelled against magic. In fact he could feel no magic on them at all. Even without his wand he would be able to undo them without difficulty. He didn't release himself. It would be but the work of a moment and the element of surprise was much more valuable to him.

It was amazing that he was not held more securely. No anti-apparition jinxes and no magical bonds. Something simply did not add up, how could any group skilled enough to kidnap him without so much as a fight fail in such basic things? He was not sure if he should be relieved or concerned. The massive variation in competence displayed suggested to Harry that they might be very hard to predict indeed.

Unpredictable enemies were the worst kind of enemies.

He closed his eyes and forced himself to relax, his heart beat slowed as he carefully measured his breaths. He would need to wait for someone to come to him. If he wanted to escape he needed to wait for the door to be opened, as soon as that was done he was confident his escape would be possible. For the time being he could not Apparate out of the cell while he had no idea what was beyond.

The slow breathing calmed him as he lay there and he strained his hearing for any indication that someone might be coming.

There was a low murmur all around the building, the sounds of a city filtered through the thick walls of his cell. He could not hear anything closer, no voices beyond his cell. The loudest noise to be heard was the electric hum of the artificial blue light set into the ceiling.

He lay still and waited. Over the years he had finally come to understand the value of patience and a measured response. As he waited he reviewed his memories carefully. Something wasn't right with this situation. It was impossible that he could have been taken without his knowledge. Surely someone must have modified his memories.

He searched his thoughts and memories for clues: Feelings of misplaced familiarity, deja vu, suspiciously specific dreams. Any of those could indicate that his memory had been tampered with.

There was the first use of magic he could remember, when he'd shrunk the ugly jumper Petunia had tried to force on to him. The memory was clear and almost pensieve-like despite being more than 25 years ago. Such was the clarity that he could even remember the look of puzzled concern upon his Aunt's face as she tried to convince herself that it had shrunk in the wash.

He remembered getting his Hogwarts letter, the owls, the eggs, the milk bottles. He remembered Vernon's reaction and how it had seemed he'd finally gone off the deep end. He could even remember that peculiar shade of puce that Vernon had turned when the letters had started flooding out of the chimney.

Then he remembered Hagrid's arrival as if it had been only yesterday. His first trip to Diagon Alley and his meeting with Quirinus Quirrell. It felt like he could remember every foul wart on the face of every Gringotts goblin.

He remembered each year. Not every day, of course, but he remembered the highlights. His fights with Malfoy, encounters with Voldemort and the first time he met each of his friends. He could remember the camping trip in his seventh year and the final battle with Voldemort.

He remembered long happy years with his family before bringing them all to King's Cross on September first for Albus's first year at Hogwarts. He remembered little Lily complaining that she wanted to go and he remembered James' delight at finding Teddy with Victoire.

He tried to think about something less obvious. When concerned about mental manipulation all Aurors were trained to try and remember a seemingly inconsequential activity, most manipulations couldn't hope to reach that depth and completeness.

Breakfast that morning. What had he had? For a moment there was nothing and he felt his hands go slick in the momentary panic then, blessedly, the memory rolled slowly into focus. They'd run out of his cereal and so he'd borrowed some of Lily's Wizard Hats. He released a breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding.

Everything seemed to be in place, he couldn't feel anything missing. Though that did raise the question of how one actually notices an absence. He'd had the mental fortitude training and he'd been obliviated as a part of that. He couldn't feel any of the rough edges between his memories that he remembered from that training.

Still, in matters of the mind it was always bets to be sure, an outsider was much more capable of recognising foreign influence. He decided that he would get himself checked out by a mind-healer at the first opportunity. It wasn't quite standard procedure but his mind was one area where Harry was unwilling to take risks.

Harry Potter drifted back into his thoughts and lingered on his memory of Albus' face when he'd been given his first training broom and smiled. He decided to go through his memories again, it never hurt to be careful. It seemed like he had time.

o-o

There were voices, footsteps! Harry regretfully surfaced from his memories when he heard the human sounds, they were drawing nearer. He sighed as Ginny's face slipped away from his sight but he lay still atop the uncomfortable bed and kept his eyes closed as he steeled himself for action.

He heard the viewing hatch snap open as they obviously checked to make sure he was not waiting to jump on them the moment they opened the door. Then came a scraping sound followed by a heavy thunk, then the door slowly ground open.

He heard three people enter the room and he kept his breathing slow and measured as he waited for his moment. He could feel their presence and hear their breathing.

"I know you are awake, Mr. Potter," said a female voice. There was a detached amusement in its tone.

His eyes snapped open and he met the smiling gaze of an attractive young brunette woman dressed in the clothes of a muggle scientist or doctor. She appeared to be looking him over appreciatively, a slight triumphant smile playing on her lips. Behind her stood two much larger men, each armed with what looked like tasers and pistols. Their faces were blank and Harry recognised the look of men who would have no compunctions about making his day very unpleasant indeed if they felt it necessary.

"So you remember your name?" she asked happily and she ticked something off on the clipboard she held before her. "Can you speak?"

This was not exactly what Harry had been expecting. A cheerful young woman asking inane questions was not standard interrogation procedure. He had been expecting something much more aggressive. The blank-faced men were much closer to his expectations but they weren't even carrying wands. Perhaps they were concerned he would be able to get hold of one?

That fear would not be unfounded.

"What have you done to me?" he growled as his temper got the better of him. "Where is Ginny? If you have hurt Lily there is no dark hole you can climb into where I will not find you."

"Wonderful!" she said as she made more notes on her clipboard. She seemed completely unfazed by his clear threat. The stony faced guards behind her shifted slightly, ready to take him down if he became a danger. "I am Dr. Maya Hansen, they were worried that the procedure might leave you brain damaged. Can you tell me the last thing you remember?"

Harry felt doubt creep into his mind. This was no ordinary kidnapping. Something much bigger was going on. Procedure? He took a deep breath to calm himself. He reached out to the woman, Maya, with his spotty Legilimency and prompted her thoughts with a question. "How did you kidnap me?"

He was no master of passive Legilimency, even after so many years as an Auror he simply did not have the inclination for it. Despite that his stubborn refusal to give up had had some benefits. He was not utterly incapable.

Images flashed before him, most made no sense at all. Her breakfast, a book sat beside the bowl. His own naked body in a room surrounded by scientists, doctors and unidentifiable scientific equipment. A room of scientists rejoicing after a successful test. Most shocking though was that he could see no magic at all. She was a muggle.

"Mr. Potter. Harry," She smiled at him in a way she probably thought was supportive. "Try to stay focused on the questions." Harry felt a flicker of guilt in her mind. "Everything will become clear in time."

There was a face, a man perhaps Harry's age. Blond and handsome with a confident smile and arrogant air. He felt slight fear from the woman and a tinge of regret. An old boyfriend perhaps? He wasn't sure, interpreting the connections between memories was no easy task even for a master legilimens and he was no master. The mind is a messy place and often memories are connected in utterly strange ways, he committed the face to memory incase it was important but accepted that it probably wasn't.

He also ignored her request to answer her questions. "What have you done to Ginny and Lily?" he said with deceptive calm, getting angry or aggressive would not get him the answers he needed, no matter how much he wanted to.

More disjointed images fluttered through her mind. A young girl she'd once known called Lily, a younger version of the woman laid upon a bed reading a book, a flower given to her by an old boyfriend. There was nothing of Harry's Lily, and no sign of Ginny in her mind at all. Did that mean they were safe? How was a Muggle involved in his kidnapping, how had they even known he existed?

"Harry, nothing has happened to your family," she said soothingly. Harry could feel the guilt within her grow as he kept asking after them. It was now obvious enough to be visible in the tightness around her eyes. "It is only you here and you will be free to leave once we are sure of your mental state. Please just answer the questions. What is the last thing you remember?"

Harry could see that she that she was telling the truth about his family. She was not being so truthful about his being allowed to leave and that was probably the source of her guilt. There was something else there, she didn't seem to be at ease with the situation at all. Perhaps she was simply having second thoughts about being involved in his kidnapping. From what he could see of her mind she did not seem an actively evil person. He was relieved that they had not touched Lily or Ginny and he felt himself relax imperceptibly. That meant he now had no more reason to play by their rules.

He hit all three with wandless Confundus charms and as their eyes glazed over his bonds came to life and snaked over each-other to release him from the bed. His back cracked in protest as he pushed himself to his feet and he grimaced in momentary annoyance. He glanced at the bleary eyed trio as he stood up at long last.

He wished he could wipe their memories but that was outside his capabilities without his wand. A bit of telekinesis and some subtle mind magic was about the limits of his abilities. He needed his wand.

"Maya," he said softly. She turned a vague smile towards him. "Can you tell me where my wand is?"

"Hmm?" she said dreamily. "No, no wand. They couldn't manage it." She sighed and stared at him in a way disturbingly like the many fangirls who dogged him at every public event.

"It's just so amazing," she bubbled. "I've always wanted to meet you! I had suuuuch a big crush on you as a kid. Everyone made fun of me for it."

Harry brushed his hand through his hair in frustration. That was not an uncommon side-effect of the Confundus charm. Its effects were similar to the 'happy drunk' stage where people were compliant and helpful. It also made people speak much more freely. Muggles were particularly susceptible, it was likely that the three before him would completely forget this conversation. But the those effects could be both a blessing and a curse. Answers tended to be vague and thoughtless.

"Can you tell me how I got here Maya?" he asked as kindly as he could manage in the circumstances.

Her face fell and she looked guilty. "I don't know really. I'm on a different project. I just had to talk to you, you know? You're my hero." She sighed happily again.

He didn't question just how she knew who he was. He assumed that this was some kind of joint venture and that wizards had been responsible for whatever had brought him here. The most important thing was that he escaped before the wizards realised he'd been given such an amazing opportunity to escape. He could easily get past a bunch of muggles, wizards would be another matter altogether.

"Why are you here?" he asked next. She did not seem the type to be involved in what must surely be some kind of international terrorist group.

"I just want to make a difference, you know? I had no other choice." A light skim of her random and malformed thoughts gave Harry very little. Confundus charms confused the mind enough that attempting to pull out anything meaningful was almost pointless. He did see a brief fleeting image of a man though.

Short dark hair and with a moustache and goatee. It was a little like Karkaroff's though Harry suspected young people would say it was much 'cooler'. He could easily imagine Rose swooning over the guy. He sincerely hoped Lily kept a more level head.

Those thoughts were not, however, of that much help to him. He decided that he'd got as much as he was likely to get from the girl, as a muggle she had very little useful information about him or how he'd come to be there. Most of the times her thoughts went to him they slid to other unrelated things, movies, books and magazines, that Harry quickly disregarded.

"That's nice Maya," he said with a gentle nod of his head. "Now can you stay here for me and watch these two?" He gestured at the two men who were inspecting their weapons with childlike interest. "It would be a big favour."

She nodded happily and Harry quickly applied a mild aversion charm to himself. It would be just enough that he could walk by any muggles outside without them thinking to stop him, he just had to hope he wouldn't run into any attentive wizards. He stepped quietly out of the cell and found himself in a long plain corridor. There were a number of other cells along each wall but as walked he looked into each and found every one of them empty. It seemed he was the only inmate in this strange place.

For a moment he debated going back and bringing Maya along with him for evidence. He decided against it in the end as his problems with Apparition suggested that he was a long way away from home indeed. He would be safer and better able to move without her weighing him down. Once he was back he could easily procure a Portkey to return, then it would be an easy job to track his kidnappers down. When wizards wanted to find someone then it was very difficult indeed to stop them. A group carrying a large number of muggles wouldn't stand a chance.

He kept moving, there was another guard at the end of the corridor. Another big and lean man with an expressionless face. Harry idly wondered if there was perhaps a factor somewhere that churned out faceless goons for places like this and restrained a snort of amusement. The man nodded politely to Harry as he walked by. That was the aversion charm at work.

Beyond was a bustling office filled with people all dressed like Maya. Harry stopped immediately where he stood. If there were any of the wizards in this group then they would see through him immediately. It wouldn't be safe to walk through the room. Luckily for him there was a window nearby and outside it he could see a broad low-rise city stretching away into the distance.

The road below was choked with old looking cars and the city looked to be rather run down. It was certainly no European city. No matter, that was his path out. With a thought and a twist he disappeared from his captors base with a quiet pop that was lost amid the noise of the office.

He reappeared amid the tumult of the street outside. Morning traffic filled the streets to bursting and Harry looked around for a indication of where he was.

The license plates on the cars all said Peru, so that was simple enough. It was likely that he was in Lima given the apparent size of the city. That was both a surprise and extremely annoying.

His only option would be to travel back to Europe the muggle way as the americas did not have any real established magical governments of their own. The muggle expansion into the americas had never been mirrored within the wizarding world. Wizards had never had the same incentive to find new land, space and sources of money like the poor or opportunistic muggles who had emigrated to America.

As a result there was no real magical government anywhere in the Americas, instead they were governed as dependent members by the ICW. They had their own sports teams but otherwise could barely be counted as countries. He would have to use muggle means to get back to Europe. From there he would be able to return to England easily.

He stepped out into the busy street and hopped into the first unoccupied taxi he saw. The streets weren't exactly moving quickly due to the rush-hour traffic and it seemed as if it was expected.

"Uhh, airoporta?" he asked the driver uncertainly. His memory was hazy but he was pretty sure that Peruvians spoke Spanish.

Whatever the language the driver seemed to understand but he gave Harry a strange look. "¿Y tu qué? ¿Te escapaste de un hospital?" he asked and gestured to his clothes.

Harry looked down and quickly realised that the medical clothes he was wearing were anything but inconspicuous. His Confundus charm would be seeing a lot of use today, that much was obvious.

o-o

A harried young researcher ran up to the overflowing desk of his overseer.

"Subject Potter is gone sir," he gasped as he leaned on his knees to catch his breath. He wasn't made for running.

The elder man stopped what he was doing immediately and glared at the younger. "What do you mean he's gone?" he growled in frustration.

The younger looked confused and apprehensive, as well he would given the waves of barely contained rage flowing off the older man. "He's just… Not there anymore. No-one saw him leave."

"How is that possible? Didn't we have guards at his door? He shouldn't even _have_ any of his abilities! He doesn't even have his wand!" He threw his pen onto the desk forcefully and it bounced off under another table nearby.

"Sir, all we know is that he was here before and he's not here now. No-one knows anything else."

"I want you to go over all the security camera footage of every entrance. We need to find out how he got out so easily." He ran a wrinkled hand over his balding head before punching the table. "You should be grateful that it's me that has to take this news to Killian. He's not going to be happy."

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**A/N:** Just a prologue, not much to see here. Things become clearer in the next chapter.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Hello again. So fairly quick update as this was the rest of the stuff I wrote as a result of the 'ah ha' moment. Updates after this will be a little slower due to dissertations and other such boring things.

* * *

**A New Man**  
_By Steelbadger_

Chapter 2

* * *

Harry Potter strolled up to the the check in desks at Jorge Chávez International Airport, only a friend would have noticed the slight tightness in his stride as he crossed the terminal. He rubbed at the faded scar on his forehead, an old habit when he was worried.

He was dressed casually in inexpensive but warm clothes, after his escape a thick winter fog had descended upon the city. He'd had to find himself some more substantial clothes as a result. He was not at all happy with the fact that he'd had to steal them. He had taken a mental note of the shop he'd lifted them from and once this was all straightened out he promised himself that he would make sure they were reimbursed. They did not look like they were all that well off.

It was late morning and the time meant there was no queue and he moved to an empty desk staffed by a young woman with dark hair and eyes.

"Hi, could you tell me when is the next plane to London?" he asked politely. He hoped she spoke English.

The young check in clerk nodded and tapped at her keyboard for a moment. "The next will be in four hours and will change in Madrid," she said in heavily accented English.

"Great," he said with an encouraging smile. "And which terminal will that be leaving from?"

"Terminal three, sir," she supplied immediately. "Would you like to purchase a ticket?"

Harry shook his head, it would be easier just to use his magic to get on without one. It wasn't like he had any money for a ticket anyway. Whatever he did would be illegal in some way. The easiest solution was simply to walk onto the plane under his charms. It was less likely to be noticed by muggles. Buying a ticket meant an electronic trail and he didn't have the ability to clean that up without his wand or any support. Perhaps once he reached Madrid he would 'buy' a ticket. He didn't want to leave any indication to anyone trying to locate him how he had left Peru.

"No thank you," he said and smiled gratefully. He'd learned long ago that people were much more inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when he was free with his smiles. Ginny always huffed and said he was taking advantage, not that she'd really been bothered. She also accused him of passing it on to James, Harry had always felt that was a little unfair. James had come by the ability completely honestly. "I was just wondering. How long is the flight?"

"It is—" she tapped at her keyboard a little more. "—twelve hours to Madrid, an hour layover then two hours to London."

He nodded his thanks and shot her another smile which she returned. "Thank you for your help miss," he said before turning to go.

He walked thoughtfully back out towards the main concourse and thought over his plan of action. Once in Madrid he would have a few options.

He could try and find the magical community there and catch either an international Portkey or Floo connection home or he could take the connecting flight. He could try a long distance Apparition to Paris too, but he suspected that would be outside his range.

His first thought was that catching a Portkey would be much faster than any muggle method but after a bit more thought he decided that the plane may still be faster. He'd never been to Madrid before, or anywhere in Spain in fact, and would have to stumble around almost blindly to find the magical community.

He could either commit a breach of the International Statute of Secrecy and hope his status could keep him out of trouble or he could simply catch the connecting flight to London. He would be home in a few hours, tops and there would be no criminal charges to dodge.

Sometimes the secrecy of the wizarding world could be a real problem. He knew his way around many of the eastern European countries but he'd never actually been south of France before. Perhaps once this situation was handled he should make a whistle-stop tour of the world via Portkey so that this couldn't happen to him again.

As he sat and waited for the plane to begin boarding his thoughts trailed wistfully to his family. It was a strange thing. He'd barely been away from them for a few hours and yet he found himself missing them already. There was also the lingering worry of just what might have happened when he'd been taken.

After a while he glanced at the tv-screens that hung from the ceiling all across the airport. He was taken aback when he recognised the face on the screen.

"... illionaire Tony Stark was attacked by militants in Afghanistan today," the newsreader said as Harry listened. "The military has said that they believe him to have been taken alive and that they have dedicated every possible resource to his recovery."

He watched in interest as they explained a little of Stark's background. A genius and the owner of the largest weapons manufacturer in the world, named as 'Man of the Year' and many other things Harry saw a man that revelled in his fame. That was something Harry couldn't imagine. The report said he was one of the most recognisable faces on the planet.

Harry didn't recognise him at all, except in the memories he'd seen from Maya Hansen. He hadn't realised just how detached he'd become from the greater muggle world. If muggles in Peru were involved with wizards and this man Stark had the ability to create the weapons they showed on the news then that could be a fatal mistake. He decided that in future he'd make sure he at least picked up a muggle newspaper from time to time.

Next up was a debate program and the subject of the day was once again Tony Stark. He watched in interest as the four people argued over how important it was that the man was returned alive. When one of them claimed that it was only fitting that Stark get a taste of his own medicine Harry stopped paying attention with a dismissive grimace. He knew exactly where that argument was going.

He took a quick look at the large clock by the departures board, at least it was getting close to boarding time. He pulled himself out of his seat and elected to visit the toilet before making with way to the plane. He wasn't quite sure how toilets worked on planes, Arthur had once mentioned that they just dropped it out of the bottom when you were done.

He had little desire to ruin someone's day like that. He'd avoid it if he could.

When he'd completed that small task he found himself staring into the mirror like he so often did each morning at home. Ginny always jokingly said he was checking himself out when she saw him. What he was really doing was documenting every small change he could find. He imagined everyone did it, even if they were unwilling to admit it. The first wrinkle, the first grey hair, the first laughter lines and so on.

Ginny said he kept getting better with age, "Like a cheese," she said. He wasn't so sure. It was strange to look in the mirror and see an unfamiliar man looking out. He hadn't changed that much since his teenage years but he knew where to look.

His scar was almost imperceptible upon his brow, visible only because he knew it was there. His eyes were still the familiar vibrant green but he felt they looked more tired and weary now. Hermione said that he looked most like himself when he was playing with little Lily. He agreed. His skin was more tanned and weathered and he was already developing the heavy stubble he would have killed for as a teen. His hair was still a disordered mess but he had, for want of a better term, grown into it. He sighed sadly, he did not regret the years with his family, he would and could never regret them. But the slow aging of his body was a constant reminder that his time with them was not endless.

Ginny, who always knew just what to say to pull him out of his funk would just say, "Then make the most of it." Then she would grin devilishly and his morbid thoughts would quickly melt away.

He splashed some water on his face and left the restroom. He might be feeling lost, adrift and worried about his family but he had to hold it together for their sakes. When he got back home he could break down. Until then he had a plane to catch.

He was still lost in his thoughts but that was no issue. He was able to walk past security desks and ticket checks without even paying attention. Each time he was waved through by the inattentive staff members. No-one noticed him and no-one commented. Sometimes people asked how it was that wizards could live so close to muggles without them noticing. This was why, even without a wand Harry was able to easily avoid interest. The spells used to stay hidden from muggles were some of the most exhaustively researched spells known. Most adults who had frequent contact with the muggle world could cast them as second nature.

He was easily able to find an unoccupied seat in the large aircraft and he settled himself down in relief. It had only been perhaps 7 hours since his awakening in the lab in Lima and he was already feeling tired. He was looking forward to sleeping on the transatlantic part of the journey.

Before making himself comfortable he checked over his charms, he didn't want to be discovered while asleep during the journey. He was unsure what the upshot would be but he didn't want to take the chance. He swore to himself when he realised he'd left out one of the standard procedure muggle concealment spells.

He'd forgotten to mask his presence in cameras. It was a rookie mistake and one the Head Auror should not be making, no matter how long it had been since he'd last been out in the field.

It was a simple spell. Most of the muggle operations spells were simple, the idea was that they should be second nature to any Auror. They did not make the Auror invisible, merely unnoticed. When CCTV had become widespread there had been some concern among the Auror corps at how difficult it might make their jobs. Fortunately the perception altering spells worked through the camera. A picture of him with an aversion charm still caused people to overlook him unless specifically searching.

The problem was computerization. With the increase in muggle ability to search for people using automated systems they wizards had had to adapt. Their answer was a simple blurring charm. All it did was blur the wizard out in any images of them, it was an old charm used to stop unwanted photographs.

It was enough. He had no doubt it caused the muggles a colossal headache. He'd heard from Hermione that the muggle spent millions each year on trying to work out what it was that selectively blurred parts of their camera feeds. Of course they did not look much closer at what was being blurred thanks to the other charms. It was further reinforced by the fact that it was actually pretty normal, the muggles now simply accepted that it happened 'd been impressed by how elegant the solution was when he'd heard it explained.

He just had to hope that Lima airport wasn't that up-to-date or that a single man was beneath notice. He was probably going to be OK, he decided.

He reapplied his spells, making sure this time that he got them all and sat back comfortably to get some shut-eye.

He dreamed of home and light brown eyes that shone with warmth and humour.

o-o

He felt a weight lift from his shoulders when the plane finally touched down in London. During the entire layover in Madrid he had been fidgeting and nervous but now that he was home he knew the dangerous part of this unwelcome adventure was over. Now he would be able to go on the attack. More importantly he would soon be home and among his family. He could already imagine little Lily's shout of 'Daddy!' and the furious high-speed hug.

Before the plane had even taxied to a stop he disappeared with a pop, the front gate of his home fixed firmly in his mind.

He reappeared and everything was wrong. The garden was wrong, the street was wrong and the house was wrong. It was… muggle. There was a neatly trimmed lawn with perfectly manicured roses and petunias. The gate was painted matte white and had nothing more than the house number on it. Where was Lily's impromptu art? Where was the perpetual snowman he'd charmed for Albus when he'd cried about how terrible it was that 'Olaf' was doomed to die?

The street was quiet and utterly mundane. There were no children zooming about on training brooms, no pops of spells or strange smells emanating from number three. The house looked soulless and devoid of everything he remembered that made it home.

Harry vaulted the gate and burst into a run across the garden. He didn't stop when he reached the door. Instead he slammed it open, shattering the glass panes and surely leaving a dent in the wall behind it. He didn't care, everything on the inside was wrong too.

The pictures in the hall were of a different family, the wallpaper was drab and boring and reminded him of the wilful mundanity of Privet Drive. The stairs were on the wrong side of the corridor and the carpet wasn't a carpet, it was tiled. No Padfoot bounded up to greet him and there was no sign of a giggling Lily hot on his heels.

"Ginny!" he cried into the strange house, bile rapidly rising in his stomach. "Lily?!"

A startled scream came from a room off the main corridor and Harry jumped again into desperate motion. He immediately burst into the living room as the desperate hope that this was all some strange joke or mistake played in his mind.

It wasn't. A strange woman was cowering in a chair and frantically pressing the buttons on the cordless phone in her shaking hands. The room was completely different to how Harry remembered it. Gone were the smiling and waving pictures of him and Ginny. Of laughing James and serious Albus there was no sign. The pictures of little Lily were nowhere to be seen and her art work which Harry had hung so proudly over the fireplace was gone.

Even the fireplace itself was gone, it had been boarded up and replaced with a fancy looking electric heater. Harry dropped limply to his knees, He didn't want to believe what was in front of him. How could it have happened? What had happened? He refused to believe for a moment that what he saw was real.

"Hello! Hello, yes police, please, help, there's a mad man in my house!"

The panicked and screeching words of the woman meant nothing to him, he didn't care. His whole world was gone. He could feel himself spiralling in towards inevitable destruction. His family was gone without a trace.

No, he wouldn't believe it. They could not be gone. A whole world of magic could not disappear, they had been moved somewhere for their own safety after his kidnapping. He had to find them, he had to tell them he had returned and he would keep them safe.

He had just enough restraint remaining to run out of the room before he Apparated away to the Ministry of Magic guest entrance. He reappeared on a nearly deserted London street near Whitehall with a loud crack. In his desperation he had thrown all caution to the winds, he did not care if he was reprimanded or even if he lost his job. He needed to know his family was safe. There, on the corner of the street, he saw a sight that was a soothing balm to his pained soul.

The phone booth was there. Just as he remembered it, red and crumbling and covered in graffiti. Nonetheless it was the most beautiful thing he'd seen since he'd held Lily for the first time. He sighed in absolute relief and in a few quick strides reached the door. He yanked it open and stepped into the familiar space, it even smelled slightly of piss as it always had.

He dialed the number as his heartbeat finally started to slow down. 62442. He waited.

"The number you have dialed could not be recog—" he slammed the phone down and picked it up again. His heart began to beat forcefully in his chest again as panic gripped him again.

He closed his eyes and took a deep calming breath. Slower this time, making sure he got every number right, he dialed. 62442.

"The number you have—" He slammed the phone down in fear and felt as if the whole world had shifted beneath his feet. It fell from the cradle and dangled near his feet. "—not be recognised, please hang up and try again."

He fell against the back of the booth and cradled his head in his hands. The world was crumbling around him, what had happened? What had they done? The magical world couldn't simply disappear. More than any time in his life Harry was terrified. He had faced basilisks, dementors, death eaters and Voldemort himself and yet the thought of losing his family and his world was the most unspeakable fate he could imagine.

He thought he was strong and yet here he was, almost broken by two failures. He would not give up on his family, on his world.

There was only one other place he could go, the place that had started it all. The place where he had found a home when it seemed the world had wished him gone. Hogwarts. Hogwarts would not let him down.

He disappeared again, this time with a deafening crack that shattered all the panes of glass in the phone box and scattered the fine shards across the empty street as dogs barked in alarm from the nearby houses.

A crack like thunder echoed across a remote valley in the Scottish highlands when Harry Potter returned at last to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

When he returned to where Hogwarts should have been.

Where the gates should have been there was nothing. Where the road should have been there was a sheep path. Where the castle should have been there was nothing but the ruined foundations of an ancient keep, the stone long ago stolen to build dykes that crisscrossed the hills nearby.

At last the manic strength that had been driving him failed utterly and Harry collapsed to the ground. Everything was gone, the entire magical world, his friends, co workers, associates, they were all gone. His family was gone, erased from existence as if they had never been.

He beat the ground until his fists were bloody and he cried his vengeance to the sky. Wind whipped around him as his furious magic tore at the world in desperation. His rage soon gave way to despair and he went limp in defeat.

How long he lay there he did not know. Minutes? Hours? It could have been either. All he knew was that eventually he found he had no more rage to give and no more tears to cry. Tears and anger would not get any of them back, they would not get him back to them. He had to be strong and he had to fight with every breath to find out what had happened and reverse it. He had no more reason to hold back.

When he had awoken the woman had said something about a procedure. What had it been? The only thing he could think of was that he had somehow been transported into a parallel universe. It sounded absurd but it was the only possibility for the evidence he'd seen.

The wizarding world had never existed here, or if it had it had been before even Hogwarts had been founded. It was a world of muggles, muggles who dabbled in science they did not understand.

Why had they brought him here? What purpose could he serve? How had they known who he was even across the dimensions?

He needed answers. That meant he needed to return to Peru. That meant he needed to catch another plane.

o-o

The next flight was not until the early hours of the next morning. It was not a standard route as customs in the US were very tight but for a wizard who could walk through those things without being harassed it was the best option. A flight from London to New York and then south to Lima would get him there fastest.

It was eight hours before he needed to catch the flight though and so he decided to sign himself into a nearby hotel. He walked up to the short balding man reading a book at the reception.

"I'd like a room for the night please," he said firmly. It was best to get the room fair and square then use magic to avoid paying.

"'Course," said the man as he lowered his book and removed his feet from the desk. "It'll be £150 for the night. What's the name?"

"Neville Longbottom." Harry decided that the people who brought him here knew his name and that it thus wasn't safe to use. Neville's should be OK though.

"Heh, you mean like the character in the book?" asked the man with obvious amusement.

Harry rolled his eyes impatiently. "Yeah, just like that. Can I have a key?" He didn't have the patience for jokes.

"Yeah, I'll need your credit card, you'll get it back when you sign out." The man turned to the rack of keys behind him.

Harry didn't have a credit card, but he didn't need one. After being hit by a Confundus charm the man forgot that Harry hadn't already given him one and handed him the key before turning back to his book and Harry was completely forgotten.

He'd never heard of a book with Neville's name in it before. Perhaps that was another difference, he could only imagine the number of differences there must surely be without the wizarding world's constant meddling and fiddling.

'Neville Longbottom' did have a nice ring to it though. Perhaps he should look into finding the book. When he got home it might be a good laugh. At least it would get Neville back for all the jokes he kept making about the 'Harry Potter' books that had been written when Harry was still a kid.

He awoke early the next morning and after dropping the key off at the reception he Apparated directly to the airport where he picked up breakfast and a morning paper. He took a seat while he tried to get a handle on just what the differences between the two worlds might be. He hadn't seen anything distinct but that just seemed impossible.

The wizarding world had had a documentable huge influence on the muggle world throughout history. It was impossible that the world would be basically unchanged in its absence.

**The Times**

_23rd May 2009_

Tony Stark Still Missing

_After the attack on the convoy transporting Mr. Stark (38) was attacked on Wednesday there has been a desperate search effort put in place by the US military. There has been no ransom nor execution video issued by his captors and some analysts believe this may be because he is dead. The business world has been reeling at the abduction or death of the billionaire and stocks in his company, Stark Industries, have plummeted. Stark's long time ally and mentor, Obadiah Stane released a statement saying that the company was just as strong as always and that when Tony returned it would be stronger than ever._

_The White House has remained tight-lipped on the issue but it is believed that they may be looking in to other companies as their primary supplier. Hammer Industries has seen its stock prices soar in the aftermath leading to some unfounded rumours that the competing company may have had something to do with Mr. Stark's unfortunate circumstances._

Harry skimmed over the rest of the article but he had the distinct feeling he was missing something. He eyes traced back to the beginning and stopped dead.

23rd May 2009.

He'd been taken back in time as well as into a different dimension? Years into the past too, not a small jaunt like he'd enjoyed with a time-turner. The last he'd known it was 2017, now he was eight years in the past.

He had a lot of very pointed questions to ask. When he got to Lima someone was going to have a bad day indeed. Harry usually did not like to spread his displeasure around. He'd make an exception this time.

o-o

Agent Maria Hill had never seen anything like this, at first it had looked like a bug but the associated effects were much too strange for that to be the case. Her eyes scanned over the file again as she walked. What kind of technology was needed to selectively blur every single camera in Heathrow? And that was not even the most bizarre part of it. She made her way to to the elevator that would take her to the office of the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D.

It quickly climbed the three floors from her office to Nick Fury's and she flipped the file closed just as the door opened. Fury was stood looking out of the window over Washington D.C. Hill was fairly sure the man did it on purpose, he'd always had a flare for the dramatic.

"Sir, we've got something… strange on the system," she said as she walked across the open space. He turned silently to greet her and she handed over the thin file.

Fury flipped quickly through the images, his sharp eye missing nothing. "It's a blur," he said blandly.

"Yes sir, on every camera there's an unfocused blur. We didn't even notice it until the automated systems flagged it up as an anomaly."

"And why is a blur on my desk?" He looked up from the images.

Agent Hill shifted her weight uncomfortably, this was the leap. "There's something strange about it sir." Fury didn't react and so she continued. "No-one noticed it until the failsafes kicked in. There's technology than can produce an effect like this and the system scans for it automatically as it's suspicious in itself. It then flags them for human oversight, this blur got flagged and then made it through oversight nine separate times before it finally got logged as a system error and got kicked upstairs. It was only then that someone pointed out it could be some kind of SEP field."

Fury raised a single eyebrow. "SEP field?"

She nodded, a little embarrassed about the term. "Yes sir, Somebody-Elses—"

"I know what an SEP field is Hill," he interrupted impatiently. "What I don't know is why you'd assume an ordinary looking blur on some camera lenses is worth bringing to me. And who decided on the Douglas Adams reference?"

"Sir, no-one even notices it unless they're told specifically about it and actively looking for it. Otherwise people just seem to… gloss over it." She pressed her mouth into a severe line. "Now that we've seen it and we have a group working on it the effect is diminished but it's still there. Any new image that we don't know includes the anomaly looks normal, once we've been told about it we can notice it. It's visible across hundreds of cameras and its location is consistent. It matches the effects described in a paper from 2002, that's where the name comes from."

"Anyway to scrub it?" he asked as he took a closer look at the pictures, his interest finally piqued.

"None so far, but we're still looking into it." She shook her head in obvious frustration. "Nothing we've tried so far gets any resolution on whatever it's hiding, we've tried standard photometric analysis and nothing comes out of it."

"Then what do we know?" asked Fury.

"We assume it's a person and probably male, sir," Hill said, the tightness of her voice betraying her annoyance at just how little they'd gained in more than 24 hours. "We were able to deduce his approximate height from parallax and occlusion in some of the frames. Whoever he is he's over six feet so he's probably male."

"Can we track him?" Hill knew that Fury did not like unknowns. He would assign a lot of resources to tracking down this guy. In this case pretty much everything was an unknown.

"The automated system can, as long as there's only one person doing it," she replied. She shook her head. "As soon as we assign a human to review the imagery they find it difficult to keep their attention on the task. We managed to get around the effect by making a list of the locations he's been flagged." She leant forward and picked out the list from the file. "First seen in Madrid exiting a plane from Lima, the system hasn't flagged anything up at Lima. He then got on a plane to London but was never seen deplaning. We were going to write it off as unimportant until it reappeared this morning."

Fury sat back and closed his eye in thought. "Where is he now?"

"We think he's on his way back to Lima. He passed through JFK a few of hours ago and breezed through security like it wasn't there," she said quickly. That certainly got Fury's attention, an SEP field was a hard idea to swallow but something like it could be very useful to S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Director of S.H.I.E.L.D nodded. "I want Agent Romanoff placed on readiness, as soon as we have a face and a location she's on his tail. I want every camera we have watching that 'blur' and if he drops it for a second I want his name, age, race and favourite colour in a file by the end of the hour. Get psychology and tech on working out how that field works and how we can get around it too."

"Sir, it's likely Agent Romanoff won't even be able to perceive the target," Hill pointed out. "From the footage it looks like everyone just pretends he doesn't exist. He may as well be a ghost."

"Then get the researchers working on the problem and have Romanoff briefed on what to expect." He said with an air of finality. "I'm not just going to sit here while some ghost makes a mockery of every security measure we currently have in place."

"Yes sir," said Hill. Fury nodded to her and it was clear she was dismissed and she turned to leave. That was what she liked about working for Fury. The man was never one for half-measures. He understood that decisive action was the only option in the game they were playing.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** It appears I may have lied about the update speed. But seriously, don't expect _any more_ to come this fast. Honestly.

* * *

**A New Man**  
_By Steelbadger_

Chapter 3

* * *

Heavy rain lashed Harry's plane as the pilot set it down with an uncomfortable jolt. The flight arrived late at night and Harry had managed to get some sleep on the second leg so he was ready and prepared to go. He was back in Peru and this time he was going to be much less polite.

While the plane was still taxiing along the main runway he disappeared unnoticed from his seat with a pop. This time he had procured a ticket, this time under the name of Lee Jordan. While he found the thought of using Neville's name amusing and a welcome distraction from the situation at hand he also knew it certainly wasn't a good idea to travel under a recognisable name.

He was taking a calculated risk by Apparating before disembarking. He was sure that there would be a record of him stepping onto the plane in New York and if someone was paying close attention it was possible that they would notice that the headcount wasn't the same once they reached their destination.

He felt that those were pretty long odds though, and even if someone did notice they almost certainly wouldn't know what it meant. On top of that he was hopeful that he would be able to get more information this evening.

He doubted the journey home would be as easy as simply asking, or even demanding, to be sent back but today would be a significant step in the right direction.

He reappeared outside the building he'd escaped just three days ago. It was a fairly unobtrusive low-rise office block. There were small clues to its unusual purpose when he looked closer.

For a normal office block it had the most up-to-date security Harry had ever seen. The glass of its windows was nearly an inch thick and Harry suspected it could stand up to a lot of punishment. There were bollards placed strategically around the entrance to ensure that a muggle hit-and-run style attack would be doomed to fail. It was, basically, a fortress camouflaged as an office block. It also looked like there was a small army of security guards on duty in and around the building. Of all the security measures they would be the only slight concern, if they were competent.

The issue with aversion charms was simple, they worked best in crowded environments. In an empty room they would provide very little help, he would need to ensure he kept an eye on the guards. He wasn't especially worried about what they might do if they found him, even something as simple as a summoning charm would deal with them in a pinch. If he wanted he could tie them up with a single gesture much as the Voldemort possessed Quirrell had been able to do when Harry had encountered him in his first year at Hogwarts.

No, the concern was that it would be a distraction.

He reapplied his charms in the hope that they might still provide some benefits and waited for the patrolling lights to move away from the window on the floor he'd been held. That seemed a good place to start.

With the quietest of pops he materialized in the office just as the patrolling guard left. That should give him a few minutes to search.

It was soon obvious that his search may be a waste of time. Despite the number of guards in the building he could find no documents or anything that would be of use to him. The place had seemingly been cleared out in just the couple of days he'd been away.

Nevertheless he methodically went from desk to desk and searched each drawer for anything that might give him a lead as to where his kidnappers had gone. Each one was as empty as the last and Harry had to restrain himself from slamming the drawers shut after a few minutes of fruitless searching.

All he found was a discarded and forgotten pen hidden below one of the desks. He looked at it for a long moment before deciding it might be of use.

It was one of those cheap pens given out by companies in the millions. Made of thin black plastic and stamped with a fading Stark Industries logo it looked much like the ones Vernon had always left sitting around the house. It was Stark again though it might be a coincidence; given just how large Stark Industries was it was likely that a lot of these pens existed. On the other hand it was better than nothing.

Harry grumbled to himself over the fact that as an Auror he'd never learned any crime-scene investigation spells what might be useful in the muggle world. He knew any number of spells for tracking the presence of wizards at a scene. He could work out what length of wand had been used by the spread of a cutting curse, he could tell the wand wood from the shade of the burn, he could even tell apart a few of the cores with some spell work. But muggles couldn't be identified by their wands. Things like fingerprints were a very niche area and Aurors, as dark wizard hunters, never needed to know them.

He elected to keep it. He couldn't remember how long fingerprints would keep on a surface but he was pretty sure he had some time to research how muggles did fingerprinting.

Of course then he had to find someone with access to a fingerprint database. This was all becoming more complicated by the moment.

As Harry straightened up he saw the torch of one of the wandering guards appear in the doorway on the far side of the room and he quickly ducked back down. After a quick check he realised that this guard, like the last, was patrolling alone. That was a mistake. They probably had some periodic call-in system in place so that any absence would be quickly missed but that was nowhere near as effective as keeping the men to squads of three.

He quickly decided on a plan of action. He waited as the man moved slowly and methodically through the room. Harry had to shift position a couple of times but thanks to his charm work and the ever shifting shadows being cast by the guard's torch he went unnoticed.

Finally he heard what he was waiting for, he heard a faint crackle from the man's earpiece and the quietly spoken response.

"Twelve in zone 3D, stamp-code A74G, clear."

That was Harry's cue. With a flick of his hand the torch jumped from the man's hand and into the corner of the room. A moment later the earpiece flew from his head into Harry's outstretched palm. Then, before he could react, thin ropes sprang out of the air and bound him tightly. Barely two seconds after signing in the OK signal the guard found himself helpless on the floor as Harry Potter stalked up to him, eyes glimmering in the darkness.

The man tried to shout for help but Harry had made sure some of the coils of rope gagged him. Even so Harry flinched at the unwelcome noise, the rope around the man's neck slid tighter until his cries were choked off. It wasn't exactly standard procedure, but Harry was now well beyond the scenarios in the Auror handbook.

"Now, none of that," said Harry with emotionless calm. "We wouldn't want us to be interrupted. I might get spooked and do something crazy."

The ropes slackened slightly and the man seemed to understand Harry's threat as he didn't immediately start shouting again.

"Good." Harry nodded in satisfaction. "Now I have some questions. If you're helpful then I think both of us will leave here satisfied."

The man nodded slowly. Harry doubted the man was sincere, the memories playing over behind the man's eyes were ones of sustained violence. That was much as Harry had expected, even if he had hoped for someone more pliable.

"Where did everyone go?" With a slight gesture Harry relaxed the ropes gagging the man.

"I don't know!" Harry could hear the frustration under the man's words. "We're just here to bring you in if you come back."

Harry looked at the man for a long time. It was hard to judge his truthfulness through the waves of rage pouring off the man. It was best to be sure. The ropes around his neck tightened again until he almost passed out. Just as the man's eyes went wide and he groped for a last breath they slackened. The man coughed and spluttered as he took deep desperate breaths.

"You see, that wasn't helpful." Harry kept his voice reasonable. Shouting would obviously be counterproductive, a measured and level tone made it seem like he was more familiar with this kind of thing than he really was. "Perhaps you'd like to try again?"

"Fuck. You," the man said through his coughing fit. "I don't know. It's compartmentalized."

Harry didn't react outwardly but internally he was pissed. He hated efficient criminals.

"What was the plan when you caught me?" he asked, trying a new direction. "Where were you to take me?"

The man's face spread into an ugly grin. "Nowhere. We were to secure you and await transport."

Shit. He had to resist the urge to punch that shit eating grin off the guard's face. What did he do now?

For a moment he considered simply handing himself in. It would certainly get him where he wanted to go but everything in his Auror training rebelled against it. He would be walking blind into an unknown situation in an unknown place and surrounded by unknown enemies. It was a Bad Idea.

He leaned low and let some of his anger bleed through. "I suggest you tell me something useful or mine might be the last face you ever see." The ropes started slowly constricting again.

The man's eyes went wide and flickered around room desperately for something that might keep him alive. As the rope slowly tightened his breaths became faster and shallower until he was gasping empty mouthfuls of air. He whispered something Harry couldn't hear.

Harry loosened the ropes just enough to allow the man to speak.

"Killian," the man gasped as he tried to pull in a great lungful of air.

"And?" Harry returned to his level persona, he didn't want to give anything away.

"He's the boss," the man said quickly. "Or he's calling the shots anyway."

Harry looked into the man's eyes with a dispassionate gaze, nineteen years of Auror work had given him a lot of time to practice his poker face. Inside he was very pleased indeed.

"And you think that's useful to me?" he asked blandly.

"Well, yeah. I mean, he's the boss," the man said uncertainly, his eyes wide and pleading. "Stan said Killian built Aim from the ground up. If you can find him you'll be able to find out anything you want to know."

Three names. Maya Hansen, this 'Killian' and his company, 'Aim'. That was more than he'd had before but it was much less than he'd hoped. He also had a potential link to Stark Enterprises to explore.

Was that enough to work with? He didn't have much experience of tracking down information without simply going through government channels. There had been that one lecture Hermione had put on at the Ministry explaining the capabilities of the muggle's internet but he'd never had cause to use it. It simply wasn't useful to the magical world as the Statute of Secrecy precluded putting any wizarding information on such an open platform.

He could probably 'convince' someone to give him a hand.

"So. Uhh. Can I go?"

Harry refocused on the matter at hand. Letting the man go would be a mistake. Too much knowledge of Harry's abilities, something they evidently knew little of given how they had organised their defence, was a bad thing. But he couldn't wipe the man's memory and no amount of confounding would make the man forget what Harry had done.

"—ksh twelve check-in."

His eyes went back to the earpiece still held in his hand. In a moment he decided to let the man decide his own fate. Harry extended the earpiece to the man and nodded, a stony look in his eyes.

The guard's gaze darted from Harry to the earpiece and it seemed he understood Harry's unspoken offer. He licked his lips nervously.

"Twelve in zone 3E, stamp-code G34D. Clear."

There was a pause.

"3E clear, confirmed."

Harry saw the man relax almost imperceptibly at the response and for a moment the man's eyes slid to the door by which he'd entered. Harry sighed, he'd probably sent the duress code, whatever it was. That meant Harry had a minute, tops before some muggles with guns tried to capture him.

What a waste of time.

"Well, I did gave you the choice," he said regretfully. It had been a long time indeed since he'd had to kill anyone and he'd never killed anyone he had at his mercy. But now that he didn't have the Auror force and the British Magical Government behind him it was a completely different business. He couldn't afford to let them know how much Harry knew or did not know. Something as precise as an Obliviate certainly couldn't be done wandlessly. That left only one unpleasant option.

He waved his hand to pick the man up and then quickly threw him against a nearby table. His neck struck the edge and his spine made a sickening cracking noise. The man's eyes and mouth went wide but he could say nothing, no sound escaped. Harry looked away for a few seconds it took the man to stop gasping for air and tried to remember why he had to do what he was doing. Soon the man's struggles stopped and with another gesture the ropes dissolved into the air.

He looked around the room for a moment, thinking quickly. He could no doubt easily incapacitate any of the reinforcements sent, apparition and thrown desks were more than enough to deal with some muggles.

Would there be any value in it though? Probably not. Given the competence they had already displayed he suspected that no-one here knew anything about how he'd been brought here or why. It was unlikely they even know where the 'transport' would take him. Giving himself up still was not a risk he was willing to take.

He grabbed the body and disappeared with a loud pop at almost the same moment as all the lights on the floor burst into life.

He appeared in a nearby alley and stopped for a moment to blink away the spots that had been left by the sudden light. He had to admit that had been a pretty good move, they might even have got some shots on him if he'd intended to stay.

He dragged the body of the man into the shadow behind one of the large bins scattered along it. He quickly went through the man's pockets for any more information he could find.

A wallet, a lighter, a pack of cheap cigarettes, a phone and some kind of photo card ID.

The ID card was completely plain. It had a face, a number and a bar-code and that was it. No name or company logo or any other distinguishing information. Harry put it to the side as probably useless.

In the wallet was a small amount of money, some of it US dollars and the rest was probably Peruvian currency as it had 'Nuevo Sol' written on it. There was a US driver's license for a 'Warren Bramley', some debit cards and, finally the grinning picture of a young blonde haired girl who looked no more than five.

Harry stared at the picture for a long moment, the realisation that he'd just killed some other little girl's 'Daddy' while trying to return to Lily was a heavy one. He closed his eyes and shook his head to clear those thoughts. Everyone had family, even evil bastards, he knew he couldn't let something like that keep him from doing what had to be done. It did make it harder to decide what to do with the body though.

His first thought had been to chuck him in the nearby sea or something but the thought of the little girl never knowing what had happened to her father made him rethink it. If he just left the body then surely someone would find it and his family would get some closure. Harry wasn't sure if they would be able to get much information on his abilities from the body but it was unlikely. Everything Harry had done to the man had been physical, if he'd had much in the way of martial arts training he could have done it without magic.

That was probably the best. He decided to keep the wallet though he elected to leave the picture with the man's body. It simply felt right.

He turned his sights on the phone. He was no expert in such things but it was some kind of smartphone. He sighed in relief when he found access to it wasn't locked, breaking in to electronic systems was another thing that was definitely not on the list of required skills for an Auror. The sum total of his knowledge on the matter came from another of Hermione's lectures on recent developments in the muggle world.

He checked through the contacts and made a quick note of some helpful looking numbers. The one titled 'Work' might be useful if he could work out where it went. Most of the rest looked like family and friends. He felt another pang of regret when he saw one number titled 'Sharon ' but quickly pushed it aside.

On the spur of the moment he decided to ring up the 'Work' number. He was disappointed again. It was some kind of automated system, the person ringing up was asked to leave a message, along with some confirmation code, which would then be passed on to the relevant people.

The level of security was pretty impressive really. Harry decided there was little else he'd get from the man. He quickly smashed anything electronic the man had had on him then sat him upright against the wall so that he looked like he was merely asleep. He pressed the photo of the little girl into the man's breast pocket and stood up with an air of finality.

Given just how little information he'd been able to gather this evening he elected to return to the building. Careful not to get caught in anything unexpected he Apparated to a place well down the street first and then to a rooftop overlooking the building.

In just the quarter of an hour he'd been gone it had become a hive of activity. Three black SUVs were arrayed along the street outside and he could see a group of men in body armour and carrying automatic weapons walking back and forth between the building and the vehicles. The lights throughout the building were on and in the room he'd visited he could see a team of men bagging every little thing they could find, there wouldn't be much.

Harry watched them work for more than two hours and he felt tiredness set in. He'd been constantly on the move for more than four days by this point and though he'd managed to grab some sleep on the planes and in the hotel in London the jet-lag was starting to get to him.

He couldn't stop paying attention now though. If he could follow this secondary team to wherever it was they'd come from he might have a proper lead. He missed the tracking spells he could have used had he had his wand but with Apparition and aversion charms he would be able to keep up with them without much difficulty.

It wasn't until the following morning that it looked like they might finally be ready to return to wherever it was they'd come from. Harry took a quick mental note of the number plates and decided on the primary target should they split up en route.

He chose to follow the one they'd packed the 'evidence' up into. The other SUVs were just full of the heavily armed men, they probably didn't know anything more than the one Harry had interrogated. Whatever evidence they'd gathered was certainly going somewhere where people might know more.

He followed them carefully through the city streets and, as he'd expected, they soon split up. He stayed with the one he'd designated before time as it moved through the slowly increasing traffic on Lima's early morning streets.

It soon became clear that wherever the vehicle was going it wasn't in Lima as they joined the main motorway out of the city. Harry was hard-pushed to keep up with his short Apparition jumps. The buildings around the motorway were slightly further away than he felt comfortable with and the streets nearby were much too busy for him to Apparate to even with his charms.

He'd have to do something drastic. Whoever was driving the car was almost certainly the person Harry needed to question.

He Apparated once again, this time he took a risk and appeared nearly three feet from the distant rooftop he'd set his sights on. He grunted in surprise as he dropped to the ground but quickly recovered and set his eyes back on the target. The high-end black SUV wasn't difficult to see, it stood out very obviously among the older vehicles on Lima's roads.

Carefully but with as much force as he could manage he reached out to the front tire of the SUV and yanked it as hard as he could with a summoning charm. The SUV swerved abruptly as the steering wheel spun suddenly and broke out of the surprised driver's grasp. It smashed into the back end of the car it was overtaking sending debris and broken metal and glass skittering across the road. Both cars spun wildly across the lanes, the back end of the other, much older car almost completely destroyed. Harry Apparated closer and with another application of magic lightened the SUV for a moment causing it to flip over onto its roof when it caught on a curb.

After a few long seconds of crashing, screeching metal and surprised horns from surrounding cars the SUV slid to a halt. Harry quickly Apparated in close and yanked the door open. He shot a Confundus at the driver and two other occupants before doing his best good citizen act and pulling the man out and helping him hobble to the sidewalk.

"You OK there?" he asked, his voice dripping false concern. "You need me to call anyone?"

The man shook his head fuzzily. The accident and Confundus charm together had done quite a number on his faculties. "Nah, Eric hit the panic button already. They know it's a bust."

Harry thought he could already see where this conversation was going and his hand clenched unconsciously. "What's a bust?"

"The drop," the man replied as he palmed his eyes in an obvious attempt to clear his head.

So they were probably just dropping the evidence off at a prescribed place, it was likely it would then be picked up by some other courier and taken to the final destination from there. Harry shook his head at the impressive, and annoying, paranoia being demonstrated there.

"Why was it so important?" he tried.

"I dunno man, some guy broke in or something and they wanted to know how," the man said impatiently, he obviously felt it was unimportant. "Guy was kidnapped I think. Didn't find fuck all anyway."

That pretty much settled it. This whole trip had been a bust so far as Harry was concerned. A connection to Stark, a guy called Killian and some group called Aim wasn't much to go on at all.

"You ever heard of Aim?" Harry asked.

"Yeah, they're the guys that hired us," the driver said slowly as if thinking it over. "Some kinda Think-Tank. Government backed, I think."

Harry nodded. That, at least, might be helpful. If they were a legitimate business then there would be information to be found somewhere even if it was obvious their operational security was extremely tight. If he could find the connection between Killian and Aim he might be able to get an address and from there it should be much easier.

It did mean he'd probably need to return to the US if he wanted to find out more. The prospect of another 14 hour flight was not a pleasing one.

Blaring sirens caused Harry to look up as a police car pulled up to block the road around the accident and he decided he had as much as he was likely to get.

The driver was unlikely to remember Harry as anything more than a helpful stranger and so Harry patted him on the shoulder and walked inconspicuously away from the scene. No-one noticed his departure, just as no-one had really noticed his presence. Magic was a truly formidable force when used against muggles.

Harry decided to catch the next plane back to the US. He was exhausted and tired and he knew he'd close to dead on his feet by the time he got back into America but once there he'd be able to get a hotel room and work out just what day of the week it was supposed to be. The human body wasn't meant to travel through so many different time-zones in such a short time.

o-o

"What do you have for me Agent Hill?"

"Director Fury, we think he may be headed back to the US," Hill said quickly as she passed over a file. "We've been watching Lima for any sign of the camera aberration and it just turned up getting on a plane back to JFK."

"Do we have any way to identify him in person?"

"We don't know, sir." Maria Hill shifted her weight, uncomfortable to admit to the failure. "We have an image, it's in the file, that we think might be him but the techs can't think of any way to get around the perception filter once the Agent is on the ground."

Fury pulled out the image in question and examined it closely. Taller than average, maybe 6'2". Mid length black hair, glasses, athletic build. Probable age range 30-40. He didn't look like much. Were it not for the confusion his little tricks were causing Fury wouldn't have given him a second glance.

"That's not good enough." He looked up. "I don't care if we have to talk Romanoff through every damn step, we need to find out how he's doing what he's doing."

Hill winced. "I don't think that will work either, sir."

Fury raised his eyebrow, prompting her to continue.

"If he has that field up we'll have just as much trouble following him as she will," she explained.

"Then what do you suggest?"

Hill was quiet for a few seconds before she gave an unsure reply. "Well, one theory is that something obvious or unusual might render his field ineffective. If he make him break cover somehow we might be able to follow him."

"And how would we do that?"

"One of the techs suggested staging some kind of attack."

Fury's eye widened ever so slightly in surprise. "Are you suggesting we set up some kind of terrorist attack inside our own borders?"

"It's the only idea the team had, sir."

"Well it's a shitty idea!" said Fury, his voice raised. He stood up from his desk and stalked to the window.

"Well we can just wait for him to break cover himself," Hill pointed out. "If we keep an agent near his general location he might be able to catch him when he does."

Fury sighed in frustration. So it was a choice between terrorizing innocents and just sitting back and hoping. "Very well, do what you can to steer Romanoff into his general location. Then, I suppose, we just have to hope he slips up."

When Hill didn't immediately accept the order and leave Fury turned around and fixed her with a knowing stare.

"What is it Agent Hill?"

"Are you sure Romanoff is necessary here, sir?" she asked, meeting his eye. "Wouldn't she be of more use extracting our source from Odessa?"

"Do you know another agent with enough experience to track someone we can barely even notice?" he said reasonably.

She shook her head. "No, but there's nothing to suggest she'll have any more luck than any normal field agent."

"You're familiar with her history, are you not?" Fury asked as he walked back over to his desk and sat down. She nodded. "Of all of our people she is the one most familiar with this mental manipulation and subversion. I disagree with your assessment. Is that all Agent Hill?"

"Yes, sir."


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** I lied again. Sorry.

* * *

**A New Man**  
_By Steelbadger_

Chapter 4

* * *

When Harry stepped off his plane at John F. Kennedy International Airport he imagined what he was feeling must be what it was like to be an inferius. He'd been hoping for some sleep on the journey but that had been neatly nipped in the bud by the absolutely lovely young family who were sat in the row in front of him.

At first it hadn't been so bad. Harry still had a soft spot for small children and when he'd seen the three of them he'd smiled like many of the other adults on the flight had.

Of course the seasoned travellers hadn't smiled. They'd grimaced with remembered pain and discomfort and for good reason. Harry would be among their number next time he saw such a group of small kids.

The first hour or so had been as enjoyable as time in a compressed air can alongside a lot of sweaty or nervous travellers could be. The kid in the seat in front had craned over the back of his chair and grinned at Harry in a way that reminded him of James at that age. There was a funny little exchange between the mother and the child when she told him to 'stop bothering the nice man'. Harry hadn't minded and had said so, she'd shot him a tired smile and here was sure her left eye twitched. Perhaps she could sense what was to come.

Not long after that was when the screaming started.

Just as Harry had been getting himself comfortable to grab some much needed sleep the youngest of the children had decided that now was the time to scream bloody murder about the seatbelt 'not working properly'. Harry had no idea what that might entail and quite frankly didn't care.

It had continued for an hour, on and off, and Harry had first nursed the thought of slapping the little brat with a Confundus charm in the hope that they'd shut up. When hellspawn No. 2 had decided to tag team for the next hour Harry concluded that the world was playing a huge practical joke on him.

Only now that he was without his wand and couldn't just erect a silencing charm about himself did shit like this happen.

That had set the tone for the journey. Every now and then there was perhaps a half hour of blissful silence in which Harry did his level best to catch some shut-eye but without fail the next drama would befall and he would be unceremoniously yanked from his dreams by unearthly screeching.

The seat-belts, their shoes, the colour of the walls, the fact that they couldn't get their hat from out of their luggage, the food; Harry was painfully aware of every single little issue that the hellions found with the flight. He wasn't sure if his restraint could have held out much longer, he had been close to Apparating the little gits out onto the plane wing to see how they liked that.

The end result was an almost catatonic Harry nearly staggering through the labyrinth of JFK in search of the way out. His charms were still up so he had little problem getting by the numerous security checks but it was still a very long and circuitous walk to the main concourse.

He did notice that there were more of them than he'd seen last time he'd come through the airport. It seemed like every door had some check or other. None of them waylaid him, of course, but it was something worth noting. There were two options, either they had had some kind of terrorist warning or they were looking for him.

The former was more likely but the latter possibility certainly warranted a heightened awareness. It was just a pity he was much too tired to act upon it. He didn't really need to act though, he was confident his charms would see him through.

After what felt like a half-hour walk past at least ten separate checkpoints he finally made it outside and ducked into the nearest empty taxi, his sudden presence startling the driver from his magazine.

"Where'd you come from man?" the man cried in surprise as he quickly tried to hide the magazine.

"Hey, I need a hotel," said Harry, ignoring the question. He blinked constantly in an attempt to keep himself awake. "I don't care what it costs so long as you can get me there in the next half-hour."

"Hey, no problem man!" Even through his exhaustion Harry could almost hear the driver rubbing his hands together in delight. "I always wanted to do this!"

What followed would no doubt have been a harrowing journey through the night-time streets of New York if Harry had been able to pay much attention. It rather reminded him of a trip on the Knight Bus back in the heady days of Ernie Prang. The cab ducked between traffic in a way that Harry was sure should have required magic.

Most of his attention was on the radio that the man had playing much too loudly for Harry's liking. Half way through the journey the tooth rattling 'music' fell blissfully silent for a news report.

"Travellers through New York's JFK Airport had to deal with numerous delays today as a result of a bomb threat made by an unknown person. The government official in charge of the investigation has just released a statement saying that it was a false alarm and that there is no additional danger to those wishing to travel through the Airport."

Harry tuned out of the news at that point as he considered that information. It seemed as if his first assumption had been the right one. That was a relief, he didn't really think muggles had the ability to track a well-trained wizard who didn't want to be found but he was willing to accept that he certainly was not knowledgeable on muggle capabilities.

Given it was muggles that had been able to pull him to this universe he really should treat them as a real and credible threat to his own secrecy.

After another fifteen minutes of death-defying and frankly impressive driving he was deposited outside a very nice looking hotel right on the half-hour mark. The driver looked back at him with a broad grin on his face, Harry could tell he'd enjoyed that immensely.

Harry 'paid' with a negligent wave towards the driver who let him out onto the pavement. Harry stumbled a little as he got out due to his extreme tiredness but managed to stop himself from falling.

A number of well-dressed men in suits were hanging around and one came up to offer Harry a hand with his luggage. Of course there was none and so Harry sent him away again with a grunt before walking through towards the hotel doors.

It wasn't until Harry was through the door of the building that he realised just how out of place he was in his rumpled Peruvian-bought clothes. It had a high vaulted glass ceiling that shone a diffuse light down upon the reception area. A flawless mirror-shine marble floor stretched across the wide space and tall columns topped with detailed golden moulding.

He stopped for a moment when he realised the taxi driver had taken him seriously when he'd said price was no object. This was one of the swankiest hotels he'd ever seen. He shook his head in amusement and continued up to the pretty receptionist who was looking at him dubiously.

"Welcome to the Plaza Hotel," she said with a charming smile despite Harry's disheveled appearance. "How may I help you?"

"I'd like to book a room for… ehh… a week?" He wasn't sure how long it would take to find the information he was looking for. If he needed more than a week it was a trivial matter to extend his booking.

"Very well, sir," she said in the same polite tones though Harry could see the doubt flickering in her eyes. "May I ask you your name?"

"Ron Weasley," said Harry easily. If Neville's name was worth comment then it was probably best to avoid it, as amusing as it might be.

She just nodded and tapped the name into the computer. "The fee for seven nights will be $7790. How would you like to pay?"

Harry waved his hand at her, now used to the process. "Of course, not a problem."

Her eyes unfocused for a moment and the smile slackened slightly. "Thank you, sir. If you will wait just a few seconds I will get you your key."

He nodded and turned his back to look out over the hotel foyer. Being late evening it was quiet with only a few men in suits slightly too large for them scattered about. It was likely that they were security, if Harry remembered correctly muggles in America were allowed to carry guns around and the loose suits probably served to conceal them. He resisted the urge to pry into their thoughts with his limited Legilimency, there was a time and a place after-all. It wasn't like he invited others into his own mind.

"Here you go, sir." The young woman had returned with a plastic key card, another hotel employee following in her wake. "Terrence will take care of any luggage you have and see you to your room."

Despite the obvious lack of luggage the porter insisted on leading him through the maze of opulent corridors to his room. The man attempted to make some small-talk, asking what Harry was in New York for and other similar questions but Harry proved to be a poor partner. His mind was fixed on the wonderfully soft bed that was coming closer with every step. He also didn't see the need to treat everyone as if they were old friends, it was a peculiarly American affectation.

He was extremely impressed by the decor and he regretted that Ginny and the kids weren't there to enjoy the grandeur with him. He was sure Lily would have acted every inch the princess she occasionally believed herself to be. He smiled sleepily as he daydreamed about the wonderous expression that would have surely been on her face had she been with him.

He'd have to bring her here when he got back. Perhaps for a family holiday next summer. He had a lot of time owing at work and it wasn't like the country would collapse without his presence any more. The price was pretty steep but he could easily afford it.

When they reached the room Harry was once again impressed by the lavishness of the hotel. It was obvious that the rooms had been redesigned recently to looked much more modern than the rest he'd so far seen. He found that he rather missed the archaic detailing though, he supposed it was his long years in the wizarding world that made him prefer the older styling.

When he'd finished looking about the room and staring longingly at the bed he noticed that Terrence was standing patiently by the door. He was still smiling in that slightly off putting way of people who'd been paid to do so.

"Is everything to your satisfaction, sir?" Terrence asked attentively. Harry got the feeling that something was expected of him.

"Yes, thank you," he said gratefully. "This will be fine."

The porter hesitated a moment before there was a slight flash of annoyance in his eyes and he turned to leave. Harry looked on in confusion as they closed the door behind themselves just a little more forcefully than was strictly necessary.

He shrugged it off, the wonderfully comfy looking bed was calling to him.

o-o

Harry surfaced from his sleep groggily the next morning. Light was streaming in through the still open curtains and he groaned irritably at the impoliteness of it. When he'd at last got the room to himself he had done little more than collapse onto the bed, fully clothed.

The clothes he'd been wearing, which had already looked rather questionable, now looked exactly like they'd travelled half way around the planet and then been slept in. They smelled like it too. If he didn't want to be mistaken for some homeless man he'd have to do something to fix them up, or find something new.

Slowly, he pushed himself off the bed and smacked his lips as he tried to get the taste of the strange aeroplane food out of his mouth. It was a bit like having a hangover only without the headache or the enjoyable night before.

He shuffled into the bathroom and set the shower running as he stared blearily at his image in the mirror. His hair was sticking up in every direction, much worse than his usual morning. One half of it was completely flat on the side he'd been laying on while the other looked much like he'd been hit with an Electrification Curse.

A hand scraped over the beginnings of a beard, six days of growth meant he was pretty close to having a full beard.

All in all he looked like utter arse. He was glad he didn't look like this normally in the morning or he was pretty sure Ginny would have kicked him to the curb ages ago. Well, perhaps not, he was fairly sure she was joking when she'd said that.

He stopped scratching at his beard when he noticed something that caused his heart to clench. His wedding ring was gone. He hadn't even thought of it when he'd been brought here. He'd been naked and without his wand but he'd never thought that his wedding ring might have been lost too. He stared at the pale skin of his finger morosely for a long minute before deciding that it would do him no good to cry over spilled milk.

If he could then he would try and find a replacement for it. He'd also see if he could find some way of recreating some pictures from memory of his family. His loneliness in this universe was something that he felt would hit him pretty hard. It was not often he'd been separated from his family for so long.

But no, he couldn't dwell on that or he'd never get back to them. Small steps add up to big journeys. He just had to keep making those small steps. He looked back up at the mirror and set his sight on the first small step.

He really wanted to get rid of the beard, he'd always hated the scratchy feeling it left him with. He searched through the cabinets and drawers in the bathroom and was extremely happy to find a small electric shaver. He'd never used one before but he knew the basic application.

It took nearly ten minutes for him to be satisfied with the results. It was nowhere near as good as the charm he usually used but once again he'd never tried it without his wand and he didn't really want to explore what that charm could do if improperly used.

He shrugged off his clothes and left them in a smelly heap in the middle of the otherwise pristine floor. He then stepped gratefully into the almost scalding hot shower, for the first time in days he was looking forward to feeling human again.

After more than half an hour under the wonderfully hot waters he finally stepped out and wrapped himself in one of the embossed towels. He looked at the sorry little pile of clothes and tried to work out what the best thing was to do. The idea of putting them back on didn't much appeal to him, after 19 years of comfortable life he was rather used to his clothes not itching or smelling of overweight men.

He finally elected to make an attempt at cleaning them up a little with magic before heading out into the city for replacements. He still wasn't happy about all of his less than legal actions but he reasoned that he had no choice. With no government to go to he was on his own.

He picked them up and walked back into his bedroom only to be stopped short by a surprised squeak. His clothes dropped to the floor, forgotten and he was lucky his loosely held towel did not join them. His hands flexed just slightly as he prepared to perform whatever magic he needed to escape the situation.

"Oh my! I am so sorry, sir. I didn't realise you were still here! I knocked and—" cried a voice with a distinct English accent. It was one of the hotel maids.

Harry quickly sized her up as a potential threat. Small, maybe 5'2" or 3". A slim, attractive build likely favoured by the hotel management. Dirty blonde hair and worried sea-green eyes that were currently flickering between Harry and her own feet. She looked a bit younger than Harry, perhaps late twenties or so at a guess.

Probably not a threat then. His stance relaxed almost imperceptibly and his hands loosened, no longer ready to cast a spell at a moment's notice.

"Don't worry about it, miss," he interrupted her soothingly. "I wasn't listening out for your knock, I've had a rather trying few days and was enjoying my shower."

"I really am sorry," she continued to babble worriedly, seemingly not appeased. "I really shouldn't have come in—"

"Calm down." He made calming gestures with his hands. He had to make a quick grab for the towel that took that opportunity to try and make a getaway. "I'm not going to complain to anyone, OK? I'll just head back into the bathroom and get changed and you can do whatever it is you need to do, yeah? I'm heading out now anyway."

She didn't look convinced but bobbed her head in acceptance of his plan. Harry quickly retreated back into the bathroom and decided to put the cleaning plan on the back burner for now. It would probably take a few attempts and some experimentation before he had any luck with the cleaning charm.

He dried himself off haphazardly and threw the clothes back on. He grimaced as the old familiar smell of sweat and tightly packed bodies returned but he'd just have to put up with it for now.

When he exited the bathroom for the second time he was surprised to find that she hadn't run off in embarrassment but was instead fighting what looked like a losing battle with the sheets of his king-size bed.

Harry watched for a few seconds with a slowly spreading smile. "You want any help with that miss?" he asked eventually.

The reply was muffled by the sheet but he could still hear it. "Oh no, sir. Everything's alright. I usually have a partner for this but he called in sick this morning but I'll manage."

After another minute of amused watching and flapping sheets it seemed she gave up. The hands that had been raised in the air in an attempt to straighten out the sheet dropped to her side in defeat. "Are you still there, sir?" she said from inside the duvet cover.

"I am." He made no attempt to cover the laughter in his tone.

"… could I have a hand?" she asked in a small voice.

Harry let loose a bark of laughter at that. He was actually pretty happy she'd turned up, it kept his mind off other, darker things. "Of course. Here, let's get that off you first."

He was able to pull the bedsheet off her quickly and together they set about making the bed. It was much faster work with two people and Harry took the opportunity to ask a few questions.

"I couldn't help but notice your accent," she said as he worked the duvet into the cover. "Where are you from, I can't quite place it?"

"Oh, all over," she said with a small smile. "My parents moved about a lot. What about you? Somewhere in the South, right?"

"Good ear," he said, a little impressed. "Surrey, actually."

"We stayed around there for a while when I was twelve," she said with some interest. "Guildford, you?"

"Little Whinging," he answered. She looked a little puzzled at that. "Near Dorking."

She nodded thoughtfully and fell silent. As they were tucking the bedsheets in properly Harry asked his other question. "Do you know how I could get to the Library from here?"

"Oh, yes. Just walk down Fifth," she said helpfully. "It's probably about a half an hour walk but you can't miss it. Or catch a cab."

"Thanks," he smiled gratefully. It would have just asked at reception for directions but he still appreciated the help.

"Huh, where are my manners?" he said once they'd finished and he realised he still didn't know her name. He extended his hand to her. "Ron Weasley at your service, it's nice to meet you."

This time the smile was blinding, all trace of her earlier nerves gone. There was an undercurrent of humour there too. "Laura Matthers," she said as she took his hand and shook it happily. "But you don't look like a Weasley."

The hand with which Harry was shaking her hand stopped dead at that but before he could say anything she seemed to realise she'd said something wrong.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," she said quickly the nervousness now back, full force. "You probably get that all the time. It's just, I've never heard of a real person by that name before. I just thought, you know, that it's from the Harry Potter books and—"

His grip tightened ever so slightly and he saw her eyes go wide in fear. He quickly released her and tried to bring his raging thoughts under control.

"Harry Potter books?" he asked, a slight quaver in his voice.

"You don't know them?" she said in obvious surprise. "They're probably the most successful books ever."

Harry coughed uneasily as he tried to clear the lump in his throat. "Is that so?" he managed to say. "I must have been living under a rock for the past few years. Well, Ms, uhh, Matthers, I really should get going. Thank you for the information."

With that he quickly made his way out of the room and didn't even respond when she called after him.

"Uh, well, have a nice day Mr. Weasley!"

o-o

This was utterly bizarre.

Harry collapsed back in his chair in the corner of New York's huge public library. His name was indeed on a set of books. And they weren't the books he remembered. The ones he remembered, the ones Neville would occasionally read excerpts from, were ridiculous affairs. They were filled with mermaids and dragons and even, in one case, a nundu. Generally Harry battled them, or talked them into surrendering. There was always some pithy 'believe in yourself' moral at the end and a picture of an idealised and annoyed looking Harry Potter on the front cover.

These books had none of that. Well, they did have battles with mermaids and dragons but that was only because Harry himself had had some run-ins with them.

They appeared, on brief examination, to be an almost completely accurate recounting of his days at Hogwarts. Even down to stuff no-one but Ginny, Ron and Hermione knew about like the details of what had happened in the Chamber of Secrets or what he'd said to his parents when he'd gone to meet Voldemort and his own death in the Forbidden Forest. He even looked like the character was described. He wouldn't be surprised if, given the description, someone actually recognised him.

Harry had no idea how to react. The reaction he'd had when he'd found out the books in his own universe had been incredulity. These books were something else altogether. They'd been written by some woman Harry had never heard of.

Was she involved with Aim somehow? That seemed unlikely given how secretive they were. If they had the ability to see into or kidnap people from parallel dimensions then surely they wouldn't shout it to the world by publishing their findings.

Were all stories just the written account of some real person in a parallel reality? Did Martin Miggs the Mad Muggle actually exist somewhere? Harry's mind was tied in knots at the possibilities.

When he got back he was sure the Unspeakables would have a field day with this. Hermione too. The possibilities were literally endless.

Was there a universe where Lockhart's stories were actually accurate?

Probably not. But still. The consequences of such a thing were staggering.

He decided that he needed much more time to think it over. He couldn't afford to skip over something like this, he needed to really consider it. He needed to take the time to let the revelation settle in his mind.

It was unlikely he would be able to do much research on Aim with this thought rattling around his mind and so he made his way back out of the library and started to wander almost aimlessly around the city.

Hermione had once said that according to muggle scientists every possibility did exist, in a way. Harry hadn't really understood what she had been trying to explain but his understanding was that anything that was possible was guaranteed to happen, even if it was extremely unlikely. Somewhere, it would happen. It was like shuffling a deck of cards, it was theoretically possible to end up with the cards in exactly the opposite order to now they had started. Hermione had said that that meant that somewhere, it had happened.

It hadn't been all that satisfying to Harry then but now he gripped that explanation like a drowning man grips a log.

The alternative was too incomprehensible to have even a chance of being true. For a moment he'd thought of one of little Lily's nursery books. In it a princess had wished really hard and the prince of her dreams had come to life out of her book.

What if he was the prince?

It was a worrying thought but it was also obviously impossible. He knew that souls existed as real things and no-one could wish them into being. There were no wizards in this world until he'd appeared, if there was no magic then how could anyone have wished for him? How could he use magic if it didn't come from something within him?

No, it had to be the dimensional travel, as strange as it sounded it was still the most reasonable answer.

He walked for a long time throughout the late morning and early afternoon before he came to another realisation.

He'd completely lost track of what day it was after his displacement and the dozens of time zones he'd covered since his arrival but it was James' birthday.

That was a sad thought. His son had been at Hogwarts on his birthday for 3 years now of course so Harry wasn't really missing that. It was just the thought that he wasn't even in the same universe as them. It was also a bit confusing as in his home universe it wouldn't have been James' birthday at all.

He contented himself with humming a Happy Birthday tune under his breath. That would just have to do.

He had other things he wanted to get done today. He needed more clothes before the hotel threw him out for smelling like Mundungus. His fingers twitched subconsciously in preparation.

o-o

He returned to the hotel later that evening fully fed and with an armful of bags containing a new selection of clothes. He'd taken the first opportunity he could get to dump his stinking Peruvian clothes.

He knew that his hotel probably had a laundry service of some kind but he was now sick of the rough and scratchy clothes he'd picked up barely a week ago. He's dropped them in a dumpster in one of the many side-alleys and good riddance.

He now had real clothes. He'd eaten real food, not suspicious airline stuff and he'd slept in a real bed. He was finally on his feet again despite the momentary setback he'd experienced that morning.

He hadn't been able to find anything on the 'Aim' people, nor had he found anything at all about Killian except a very old news report about 'inspirational people with disabilities', apparently he'd lived in Albany at the time but there was nothing else of use. He had however been able to find some information on Maya Hansen.

It wasn't especially interesting or useful. It was her doctoral website from when she'd been at Harvard. Nothing she'd done, so far as Harry could make out through the arcane academic prose, had anything to do with dimensional travel or anything of the sort.

She had indeed been telling the truth when she'd said she had nothing to do with Harry's situation. It didn't help him much now though. The mobile number given was an old one and no-longer connected and even asking her old co-workers didn't turn up any better leads than he already had.

They hadn't even known about Aim. Instead they'd said she had left to pursue a job at Stark Industries.

The coincidences were mounting. Tomorrow, Harry decided, he would take a closer look into Stark Industries and make another attempt at finding information on Aim. If he had to Confund someone at the library to give him a helping hand then that was the price he had to pay. It certainly wouldn't hurt them and he really needed that information.

Despite the setbacks Harry was pleased. That morning he'd said he needed to start making small steps and that was exactly what he'd done. Tomorrow he would make more and soon he'd have stepped all the way home.

He fell asleep that night hopeful that this ordeal would soon be at an end.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** Very nearly done the exams and wotnot. Shadow of Angmar will see an update 'Soon™'.

* * *

**A New Man**  
_By Steelbadger_

Chapter 5

* * *

Harry was starting to feel like an animal in a cage. It was as if the world was conspiring against him to keep him in one place. After more than a month of exhaustive research on all the potential sources he had turned up very little.

He'd been able to find out was that 'Aim' was actually 'A.I.M.', an acronym that stood for 'Advanced Idea Mechanics'. It was such a seemingly small thing but his general unfamiliarity with the computers needed to do the research had made it much more difficult. He'd tried to get some help from the library employees or other members of the public but it really hadn't worked out.

They'd been willing enough to show him the ins and outs of how to use their computers, even if they did shoot him incredulous looks when he admitted to not having used one for more than twenty years. Unfortunately the Confundus charm proved to be utterly useless when it came to the matter of getting them to help him in a more concrete way.

Put simply it didn't last long enough to achieve much and it made them fairly useless at the process anyway. The kind of research he wanted to do required real logical thought and the Confundus charm was specifically designed to temporarily circumvent it.

So it had been down to Harry and his two fingered pecking at the keyboard to find what he'd been looking for. It took him more a long time. Finally, now, though he had something to go on.

A.I.M. had been set up by Aldrich Killian in 1997 as a research organisation with the stated aim of improving the lot of humans everywhere. There was nothing special about it, a few buried reports and glossed over press releases that contained a lot of very flowery and optimistic language.

It was a nice idea but it looked very much like they'd lost their way in the twelve years they'd been operational. Or perhaps they'd merely lost sight of exactly what constituted acceptable sacrifices. Perhaps he would ask when he finally caught up to them.

Whatever it was now the company had previously been listed at a suburban address in New York state for three years before dropping almost completely out of sight. Its website now showed only the logo and some blurb about science being the solution to all the world's ills.

After a month of nigh fruitless searching Harry was about ready to climb the walls. He'd put all thought of the strangeness of the 'Harry Potter' books into the back of his mind. Dimensional weirdness could wait until he was back home.

He leaned back in his chair in the library and absentmindedly fiddled with the ring he'd pilfered a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to paper over that particular crack. It wasn't the same of course, it was worn wrong, it felt wrong and it simply looked completely wrong. But when he was working and bored he often played idly with the ring and the lack had grated across his mind every day until he'd finally given in and stolen a replacement from one of the many jewellery shops around New York.

That had been the one day he'd allowed himself to become distracted from his task. Despite not actually bringing him any closer to his family the action had felt _good_. Harry hated sitting around inactive and the weeks of research he'd slowly slogged through certainly felt like inactivity to him.

This weekend he planned to finally take action again, and this time it would hopefully be constructive. He was going to take a look at the address that had first been listed as the corporate address of A.I.M. It was a long shot and he expected to find nothing but his next step was to fly the breadth of America to try and get some information from Stark Industries. He couldn't Apparate that kind of distance and so he was once again reduced to muggle transportation.

Outside the library he flagged down one of the hundreds of yellow cabs and climbed into the back seat.

"Hey, I need to get to Albany," he said as he took his seat.

The driver turned in his seat and looked at Harry as if he was insane. "Are you shittin' me? That's like three hours each way, asshole. No way I'm taking you there."

Harry was a little worried by just how little guilt he felt when he flicked his wrist and the man shuddered as the charm rolled over him.

"Hey, man, it's your money, yeah?"

Harry smiled humourlessly to himself. No, it wasn't.

He knew he'd become a little too accustomed to being able to Confund people into giving him everything for free. A month of free food, clothes and accommodation, not to mention an expensive ring, had long ago began stretching the limits of his moral flexibility. Perhaps it would be better if he found some way of getting hold of money. He'd decided against it before but now that it appeared the stay might be a long one he might have to rethink it.

He really didn't _want_ to rethink it though, making himself at home here felt like a tacit acceptance of his extended presence in the wrong universe. He didn't accept it and he wouldn't. Each night he fell to sleep wondering what his kids were doing and each morning he awoke and for a brief moment worried where Ginny had gone.

Eighteen years of marriage had worn a deep groove in his psyche and it was not one that could be smoothed over by a month or two away from his family. Not that he wanted it to be smoothed over.

o-o

Albany really was a beautiful town. Lush green trees lined every road and pleasant-looking American-style wooden frame houses were scattered haphazardly around. Each was surrounded by a large area of well-maintained and short-clipped grass.

The greenery reminded him a little of his own home in South Wales. Where the towns and villages in Wales often felt like they'd been draped across the soft hills and valleys of the country like a gentle blanket Albany felt more like it had been built in a park. It was green, yes, but it didn't feel quite so natural to Harry's mind.

Still, it certainly beat the constant hustle and bustle of New York.

The address he was looking for proved to be a house much like all the rest. Timber framed and clad and set inside a little manicured square of green. Harry imagined this was what Little Whinging might have looked like if it had been in America.

Harry hopped out of the car with a negligent wave of his hand sending the driver on his long journey back to New York. Harry could easily Apparate the distance back, he'd done some working out and decided he could probably make the trip across continental America in perhaps 6 jumps. It was a real pain in the metaphorical backside but it was better than taking a plane if he found he needed to return to New York for some reason.

He walked up the short path towards the porch and looked over the house with a critical eye.

It did not look to be occupied, which he thought might be unusual for such a well-to-do neighbourhood. The windows were heavy with dust and there was little sign of life anywhere nearby. The lawn and plants set around it had been maintained by someone though and it wasn't up for sale so whoever owned it obviously paid someone to keep an eye on it.

He removed the aversion charm that had been a constant fixture for the last month. He'd been getting sick of it in all honesty. He knew he needed it when he was walking around as he had been as he was sure _someone_ out there would be looking for him. That didn't stop him beginning to resent the distance it put between him and everyone else.

He hadn't spoken to anyone at all outside of his search since the maid on his first morning. He'd actually had a little hope that she might return but it wasn't to be, evidently the mortification she'd felt at walking in on him while he was showering had kept her well away. That or his reaction to the 'book' revelation.

Either way, he figured removing the aversion charm might help in this situation. He wasn't sure but if this place was anything like the Americanised Little Whinging it appeared to be it was likely he could get a lot of information from a nosy neighbour if he couldn't find anything in the house.

He knocked on the door, largely for the look of the thing as it was obvious that there was no-one in, and waited a minute before making his way around and behind the house. The back garden was large and again perfectly kept. There was a small shed at the far end, which proved to be empty and a broad deck about the back door. Otherwise it was empty and featureless.

He took a peak in through on of the back windows and saw nothing of interest, just dustsheets cast over furniture as he'd expected.

He hadn't thought this little trip would be worth much but he'd had a sliver of hope the current occupants might at least have known where he might be able to find Killian.

"Hey over there," called an interested voice from one of the neighbouring gardens. It had what Harry would identify as a Texan twang. "Can I help you?"

Harry turned and found he was being watched by a late middle-aged man wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, he couldn't look more like a stereotypical American if he tried. From his stance Harry could tell the man was a little suspicious of him.

"Hey, I was given this address," he said trying to look confused. "Looking for Aldrich Killian, you know him?"

"Sure, I know him," the man replied with a single nod. "He's not been back here in years, who gave you this address?"

Harry reached up and scratched the back of his head as he walked closer to the man so that they didn't have to raise their voices. "Well, he did." He smiled self-deprecatingly. "But it was about ten years ago, told me to look him up if I ever changed my mind."

He was playing this conversation completely by ear but he'd done sting ops before with less to go on. All he needed to do was give the man just enough information to draw his own conclusions. Harry didn't know enough to paint the man a picture, but he could give him the outline and wait for him to fill the rest in himself.

"Heh, that's a long time to change your mind," the man commented. "But come on inside and I'll see if I can find the contact number he left last time he was here."

The man turned for his house and gestured for Harry to follow when he stopped and extended his hand. "Oh, by the way, I'm Jack, pleasure to meet you."

"Harvey," said Harry as he shook the proffered hand. Now that it was obvious that his friend's names might be recognised that particular in-joke wasn't quite so amusing. "Thanks for the help."

Jack made a shooing gesture and said, "Ahh it's no big thing. Al was always a good kid so I figure he wouldn't want you left hanging."

Harry followed him into his house and was directed into the kitchen where he took a seat and looked around.

His knowledge of muggle kitchens had sadly waned since his departure from Privet Drive but it seemed fairly normal. It was large and obviously the core of the house in a way an English kitchen usually wasn't. It was a bit of a clutter, and Harry marked him as a man who probably lived alone. A couple of light coats were hung up by the door and one had an ID card for the company 'Koenig and Strey' affixed to the lapel.

"You want a coffee?" Jack asked and Harry nodded in assent. He would have much preferred tea but he really didn't trust an American to do it right.

"That'd be lovely, thanks," he said.

Jack bustled around the kitchen as he prepared the drink and made some small talk with which Harry joined in, enjoying his first proper human contact in more than a month.

"So you from England then, huh?" he asked in interest. "Been over here long?"

Harry shook his head. "No, not long. Just arrive last month, I've been getting my business all wrapped up in New York," he said and smiled as if remembering a happy time. "And a bit of a holiday too I suppose."

"That's swell. Great time of year for it too," said Jack authoritatively.

"Seems so," Harry agreed. "So you've known Killian since… when?"

"Oh we go way back." Jack chuckled fondly. "I moved out here when he was a kid. Used to help his mum with him. She had a hard time when he was younger."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, little Al didn't have the best start in life," explained Jack as he sadly shook his head. "He was a sickly kid, Mary always had a hard time keeping up. He was a fighter though, damn impressive."

Harry nodded quietly and Jack set the coffee in front of him.

"You just hang fire here and I'll see if I can't find that phone number," he said as he moved passed Harry.

As Harry sipped at gingerly at the still scalding coffee he pulled a face, it always struck him as a waste of good caffeine to put it in coffee. That said, as far as these things went, it was better than the 'Starbucks' he'd experimented with once when he was in New York.

"So Harry," Jack called from the next room. "What was the idea that had Al so excited that he'd wait ten years for it?"

"Hmm? Oh." Harry cast around for an idea and settled on the only one that might sound plausible. "I had an idea for contacting parallel universes, but my funding got axed last year. And we're so close too."

"Parallel universes, huh?" Jack replied when he was interrupted by a clattering noise. "Shit, ah, sorry about that. Parallel universes? That's a bit off the wall even for Al."

"He took a bit of convincing, but the science is sound." Harry tried to inject the kind of enthusiasm into his attitude as he'd so often seen from Hermione. It was difficult when he knew so little credible science.

He heard Jack returning and began to turn to face him.

"Well, friend, I hate to cut this short but you're gonna have to put your hands on your head now."

His host was standing in the doorway with a shotgun held in his hands and pointed directly at Harry. He raised his hands slowly and unaggressively. He reached out with his weak Legilimency and quickly realised the man was pretty scared.

"Hey, now, what's this for?" asked Harry in his most diplomatic tones. He didn't want the guy to get twitchy. Twitchy with a deadly weapon was a very bad combination, he had no desire to catch a shotgun cartridge to the face. He wasn't sure it would be deadly, magic users were impressively sturdy after all, but it would certainly put a crimp in his plans.

"Well now, Al put out word someone by your description might come snooping round," said Jack, his voice low but Harry could hear the slight quiver. "So we're just gonna sit here quiet like until the grab team turns up."

There was a chance he might still be able to get a little information from the man. Harry knew he'd have to be careful when trying to disarm him as he was clutching the gun with white knuckles as if he expected it to try and attack him. Harry wanted to try and calm the man down a little before he made his move.

"Hey, that's fine," said Harry and he kept his hands open where Jack could clearly see them. "So you work for A.I.M. then?"

"On and off," said Jack before he glanced at his watch.

"How long until they arrive?"

Jack raised the gun threateningly and Harry tried to back off while sitting down. "They'll get here when they get here, no more talking."

"Hey, I'm just trying to work out what's going on here," Harry said placatingly. He wasn't particularly worried about the man shooting him for talking. He obviously wasn't the killing type, the way he was holding his gun and his thoughts were more than enough proof of that.

"You and me both but ain't neither of us getting answers," Jack said firmly as Harry watched him try and bury his fear beneath bravado.

So Harry had the choice again. Take Jack down and see if he could find anything of use in the office he'd been searching, or sit tight and wait for the bag-men. Waiting was much more attractive now than it had been just after his arrival but it was still much too risky. It was obvious that they were looking for him and if that was the case they might do something he couldn't defend against.

It was frustrating but keeping his mobility and ability to act was still the best way to pursue his journey home. He closed his eyes in annoyance he'd wasted enough time here already.

He Apparated.

The pop of his Apparition was drowned out by the thunderous roar of the shotgun as Jack panicked. The chair Harry had been seated on and part of the table were reduced to kindling by the blast and wooden fragments flew about the room.

Harry reappeared in the same instant just a few meters behind where Jack was standing. For the briefest moment he stared in amazement at the flying remains of the chair he'd been sitting on before he thrust his arm out to cast a banishing curse.

Jack was thrown across the room into the kitchen cabinets and before he could recover the shotgun was torn from his death grip by a yank of magic. The gun clattered to the ground at Harry's feet and he kicked it away and into the room behind him.

"Sorry about the mess," he said to the stunned man. He felt a little guilty. This guy obviously wasn't front line personnel. "But I really don't have time for whatever it is that's been planned for me."

Jack groaned from where he lay among the ruins of his kitchen. Harry suspected that he'd probably broken something in the collision. A wizard would likely have been fine but he'd allowed himself to forget how fragile muggles could be.

Just to make sure the man didn't move Harry levitated the fridge on top of him and turned away to look through the office for anything that might be useful.

A gun safe stood open against one wall, a box of shotgun shells had fallen out when it was opened and they were scattered across the floor. Harry was most interested in the heavily built writing desk against the opposite wall.

He rifled through the drawers and came up with a very large stack of bills and other mundane things. He put those to the side and kept looking, there had to be something worth looking at.

After looking through what felt like the minutia of the man's financial life Harry slammed the last door shut with a growl. There was nothing at all of use in any of them. A few pay-cheques from Koenig and Strey and some other company called Omnitech was about it. From what he could see of the Omnitech payments they looked like some kind of under-the-table agreement. That might be a lead for him to look at.

There was nothing from A.I.M. or Advanced Idea Mechanics or even from Killian directly but the Omnitech payments looked pretty suspicious to Harry. He was no genius in the area of finances, the wizarding world, after all, wasn't exactly complicated when it came to the matter of how their economy was run. Aurors also had almost nothing to do with financial crimes. The Goblins usually dealt with that kind of thing themselves and in ways that ensured such attempts to subvert the system were very rare indeed.

The closest he'd ever got to a financial crime was when a young muggleborn had tried to take advantage of the gold exchange rate in the muggle world. The Goblins had found out almost immediately and the kid had known the game was up. In an attempt to avoid the Goblins justice he'd actually walked into the ministry atrium and pulled his wand on the passers-by. Harry had been in the hall at the time and had dropped the man before the second curse had passed his lips.

No-one had really been hurt and the man had been released later that day. The Goblins had picked him up and that was the last anyone had seen of him.

Despite his lack of experience in the area he still felt he felt he had a good gut for the suspicious though. Something about those cheques was speaking to him.

He crammed a collection of them into his pocket and went back out to check on Jack whom he found still groaning and trying weakly to push the fridge off his body with one hand.

"I wouldn't bother," Harry said conversationally. "Just wait until your friends turn up. How long now?"

Jack just stared at him, confused and scared, which prompted Harry to try and get some idea of his thoughts. His mind was a bit of a mess and memories were flickering in and out of sight as he tried to recover from the concussion he'd obviously suffered when Harry had thrown him across the room. That was good, it would make his recounting of what Harry had done less clear and he wouldn't have to silence him more permanently.

There might also be an advantage to letting them know what Harry was after. They needed to know who they were dealing with if he was going to cow them into doing as he demanded. A little threat might be a benefit. He wasn't some kid for a set of children's books. He was Harry Potter, Head Auror. That was something they would have to learn.

"I suggest you tell Killian that it would be to his benefit to open up communications and lose the guns," said Harry firmly as he stared directly into Jack's eyes. "He'll find I can be very persistent, and even more unpleasant if he doesn't."

Jack nodded rapidly, his eyes wide and fearful. He was saved anything more when the front door slammed open, the sound followed by the reverberating noise of boots on wooden floors.

"Help!" cried Jack desperately. "I'm in here!"

But Harry was already Apparating away, happy that he'd finally achieved something.

o-o

Harry was in a thoughtful mood when he reappeared in his hotel room with a pop. His reflection was instantly shattered.

"Oh, shit!" cried a male voice behind him.

He spun on his feet to locate the source of the voice and found a very tidy looking man with short-cropped dark hair wearing a perfectly tailored black suit. Harry wasn't familiar with muggle dress but he'd done a little work that had involved muggle law enforcement. This guy looked competent. His first thought was 'Unspeakable' but that was obviously not true. He was no wizard; no self-respecting wizard would ever carry a gun. Much more important though was what he was doing with that gun. He was drawing it in his surprise.

In a moment Harry was reacting. A hand shot out in front of him and caused the gun to leap from the other man's hand. His eyes went wide in shock as his weapon flew across the room into Harry's waiting palm. Harry opened his mouth to question the man but before he could speak though the situation degenerated further.

An explosion of light, sound and rushing air from the door threw Harry from his feet to land by his bed. He shook his head in an attempt to clear it and saw at least six heavily armed and armoured men swarm though the ruined doorway one by one.

"Stand down, sir!" one of them shouted aggressively as they tried to spread out across the too-small room.

Harry was having none of it, with an almost imperceptible flick of his hand the bed and nearest furniture leapt from their places to fly at the unknown assailants.

Only one opened fire and Harry watched in puzzlement as what looked like darts embedded themselves in the furniture and walls of the room as all six attackers were knocked over by Harry's improvised attack. The unexpectedness of Harry's attack meant none of them came close to hitting him.

Before everything could get even worse Harry decided he'd spent enough time in New York. In the next moment Harry disappeared, this time with a slightly louder pop than the one that had announced his entrance. The time from his appearance to his departure had been no more than twenty seconds and he left behind him a scene of impressive destruction.

o-o

Director Nick Fury raised his eye-patch and rubbed at his bad eye tiredly. He looked back up at Deputy Director Maria Hill.

"He what?"

"Agent Ward claims he appeared out of nowhere without any warning, sir," said his deputy dutifully.

"Teleportation." His voice was deadpan.

"That's what Ward claims. I'm not so sure. It's possible his perception filter just stopped the team from noticing his return," said Hill logically.

"Can we confirm either hypothesis?"

"I think so, the room was thoroughly bugged and the hotel has cameras in every hall. It'll take some time to get passed his ability but she can check it out," Maria said positively.

Fury nodded once. "That still doesn't explain why there's a half destroyed room in the Plaza Hotel."

"Ward panicked, sir." Fury could see that she was just as annoyed about that as Fury himself was. "He hit the panic button and the support team breeched the door."

Fury merely sat in silence as he waited for the explanation.

"The target then used some kind of telekinesis to disarm Ward and throw his furniture at the support team," she finished. Fury blinked.

"Teleportation, telekinesis, anything else?" he asked a little acerbically. He'd had a team watching the man for weeks and nothing of the sort had been reported.

"No, sir. He then teleported away. We've no idea where he might be."

Fury sat back in his chair and stared into space for a moment as he ran through the information. The new powers were extremely worrying. Had he been concealing them? Or, more worryingly, had he gained them only recently?

The perception filter was concerning enough. If more than one person had access to such an ability then much of S.H.I.E.L.D's ability to track their targets could potentially be compromised. Teleportation was simply unacceptable. It meant potentially that nowhere was secure. This man could appear in the Oval Office or _Fury's own office_ at the Triskelion without warning. He was a greater potential threat than Banner with that ability. At least Banner's alter-ego was seemingly animalistic and undirected and could be escaped. A man who could travel miles in seconds and bypass any security rendered their defences utterly useless.

The only possible upside was the personality profile they'd built up over the last few weeks. Private and solitary, yes, but also polite and deferential. Fury didn't much care about the petty crimes the man, whom some joker had dubbed 'Subject Potter', had committed. He _was _concerned about the security implications of his abilities.

In the month they'd had him under surveillance Fury had been getting periodical updates on his actions and whereabouts. They'd made for uninspiring reading. The man spent his life at the library researching a think tank called Advanced Idea Mechanics. The team in charge of the investigation had run a brief check on the company and had found little of interest to S.H.I.E.L.D. Some shady business practices, to be sure, but nothing that stood out as a threat.

Romanoff had been pulled off surveillance after just a week. The mission in Odessa had gone bad, their contact had been taken out by some mercenary and Fury had assigned Agent Romanoff to track him down. 'Subject Potter' had just proved to be uninteresting.

Eventually Fury had given the surveillance team the clear to initiate contact. They wanted to get a better handle on the man's abilities and to do that they needed to bring him in for tests. The psych profile they'd built up suggested he might be amenable to the soft approach but evidently Agent Ward had messed that up completely.

"Take Ward off the team," he said eventually. "Set him to work tracking Banner in Greenland for a while."

Hill nodded in understanding. Such an obvious failure couldn't go unremarked. "Yes, sir."

Fury thought for another long moment before coming to his conclusion. "Put Coulson in charge, this has just become one of our top priorities and I don't want any more fuck-ups."

He trusted Coulson to get the job done. Trust was a rare coin in S.H.I.E.L.D but Coulson was reliable in the extreme. He also represented a significant dedication of resources.

This time Hill didn't question the choice, she knew as well as he that teleportation was bigger news than anything else on the threat radar. She took a note and Fury dismissed her silently as he rose from his seat and went to stare out over the Potomac again.

"Oh, and Hill?" he called just as she was about to leave the room. "Change the name. We're not hosting a convention here."

She paused for a moment and turned back. "Yes sir."

Fury watched the door close behind her and turned back to the window. "Subject Potter," he muttered with a wry tilt to his lips. Sometimes the tech nerds let their imagination run away with them.


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: **What foul sorcery is this!?

* * *

**A New Man**  
_By Steelbadger_

Chapter 6

* * *

Harry reappeared in the town of Kingston, on the road between New York and Albany, with an ear-splitting crack. The sound echoed across the town but his reappearance went largely unnoticed in the sleepy suburb, a dog barked in the next street but there was no other reaction. Harry broke the silence with a single word, "Fuck."

He looked around, and was pleased when he found that his unusually emphatic arrival didn't seem to have drawn much attention. He saw a couple of nearby blinds twitch as someone looked out to see what had caused his thunderclap, but he didn't think anyone had been watching his arrival. He moved quickly out of the street, and out of sight of the hidden watchers.

They'd known where he was staying, even down to the room, and had had someone waiting for him. He drew on his training to calm himself and help him to focus on the torrent of events that had made up the last couple of minutes. He'd always told his recruits that panic served no professional purpose, it was only something to be mastered.

There had been a man in his room, well dressed in the fashion of a banker or lawyer from the muggle world. Whoever they were it had been only them and they'd been waiting for him. They also hadn't had their weapon out. That was interesting, it suggested that perhaps they'd wanted to communicate with him. At the very worst they'd perhaps hoped to lure him into a false sense of security.

No, the communication scenario was much more likely. Sure, they'd had the hit-team waiting just seconds away but where was the value in tipping off the target if they were already completely unaware of your presence? If it had been down to Harry the room would have been charmed for detection and a team of Aurors would have taken the target out on arrival. There was no need for the man inside the room unless they'd hoped to communicate with Harry in some way.

He also remembered that the guns they'd been firing hadn't used bullets. They'd fired darts instead. He didn't know much about muggle technology like that but it stood to reason that they weren't for killing. Bullets were generally pretty effective for that among muggles, there should be no need to switch to the more complex dart ammunition if its purpose was the same as normal bullets.

Unless they knew more about him than he hoped. Bullets certainly hurt and could do a wizard pretty significant damage but they simply weren't as dangerous to a wizard as they were a muggle, simple school-yard spells could heal mundane injuries like bullet wounds. So those two possibilities meant that the darts could either have been loaded with some kind of stunning concoction, or an anti-wizard mixture, if such a thing could be created by muggles.

He wasn't willing to bet on that either way. If it had been him in charge then the back-up team would have been told to use lethal force if necessary. If a meet like that went bad the balance of probability was that the target was violent and dangerous.

Finally he could tell that the level of training they had was very high indeed. Possibly even higher than the teams he'd met in Peru. They'd entered the room quickly and efficiently then immediately spread out as much as was possible within the confined space of the room. If it hadn't been for his magic it was certain they would have taken him down within moments.

The question was what he was going to do about it, now that he'd had the luxury of a few moment's thought.

Did he return to the hotel and hope that the apparent offer of communication was both real and still open to him after their little fracas, or did he continue to evade?

He _hated_ unknowns. If the events of a few minutes ago had shown him anything then it was that he could not afford to underestimate the people in this world, muggles or not. Somehow, they'd managed to track him and and had even got close to having the drop on him.

He couldn't afford to take the risk. Any meeting had to be on his own terms, whoever the group were they'd already demonstrated a willingness to use violence and a pretty damned itchy trigger finger. No, if any meeting was to happen it had to be controllable. He couldn't negotiate from a position of weakness.

So where did that leave him? He had two primary options that he could see. He could continue his research, he needed to follow-up on the Stark coincidence, or he could return to New York and try and set up a meeting with the unknown group on neutral ground.

It didn't take him long to decide. He was still unwilling to place any trust in a group of trigger-happy muggle paramilitary types. No, he'd continue with his research and the best way to do that was to look into Stark Industries.

That meant Los Angeles, and that meant a very long trip indeed. Very definitely beyond his ability to Apparate. If he was to avoid leaving an obvious trail for his pursuers he'd have to be very careful indeed from now on. He certainly couldn't convince some poor taxi driver to take him across the country.

Plane travel was out, even something like a bus might leave a trail that could be followed if he made a mistake somewhere. He grimaced, it looked like he was going to be hitch-hiking. If only Arthur could see him now.

o-o

Nearly three whole weeks, gone. Hitch-hiking across America was not, as it turned out, as easy as it seemed. It felt like he'd simply walked most of the distance though thankfully that wasn't quite true.

Had it not been for the girls headed to New Mexico for some scientific research which went entirely over Harry's head then it would surely have taken more than a month to complete the journey. They had taken him more than half of the way in just a few days, and had even provided diverting conversation. Even if their babble about Einstein-Rosen bridges was completely beyond him. He doubted even Hermione, or the boffins down in the Department of Mysteries, would have understood. The woman had this scary intensity that could only be generated by the truly erudite. Her intern, Darcy, had been easier to talk to, though Harry had needed to find that special wavelength in his brain that was usually only needed when talking to Rose.

The rest of his journey had been substantially worse. He was utterly tired of seedy motels and terrible coffee. He was tired of pickup trucks with no suspension worth mentioning. He was tired of smelly and overweight men who were nevertheless too damn nice to dislike properly.

He'd made it though. He was finally in Los Angeles and at no point during his journey had even noticed any indication that his progress was being watched by anyone at all.

That did not mean he was going to drop his guard though. The one thing he'd had in abundance for the last three weeks was time to reflect on his tactics and strategy.

It was obvious that the group he'd encountered in his hotel room in New York had found some reasonably effective way of tracking him despite his concealment charms. What was also clear was that it wasn't anywhere near completely effective.

He'd thought long and hard about how they could have been managing it. He had come up with a few theories.

The first was that his wandless abilities weren't up to snuff and that they had been tracking him through the many cameras that littered New York. It was unlikely, but not completely impossible given how little he'd practised with the ability over the last few years. As a result he'd taken to avoiding cameras wherever possible on his road-trip.

The second theory was that his spells were fine, but that his pursuers simply used some unfamiliar technology to track him. That didn't seem all that likely to Harry. He wasn't a magical theorist, but he was pretty sure the whole purpose of the spells was concealment. The spells didn't care how he was being watched, only that the people doing the watching couldn't learn anything important about him.

Nonetheless, it was a possibility. So he'd decided to do some research on the surveillance technology available to muggles.

His third theory was that there was actually some magic involved at some level. He was hesitant in the extreme about that theory as it was all hand-wave and no fact. He'd already seen that there was no magical world like his own here. None of the people he'd encountered had shown any indication that magic might be normal and so he felt that was the least likely scenario.

And so the theories continued, each more crazy than the last. Ultimately the only thing he was reasonably sure about was that he had somehow been tracked using muggle cameras, something that shouldn't have been possible, from his understanding of how the charms worked.

Until he knew more about how it had happened he would simply have to be much more careful. For that reason he had, for the first time in many years, started to grow out his beard properly and adopted a broad-brimmed hat. He'd even changed his glasses.

It might not have fooled a determined searcher, but it had been enough of a change that when he'd last chopped the beard off little Lily had burst out crying.

His journey across the states had not been without benefit, though. Now that he had taken the time to remember a few of the major towns on the route he could Apparate from Los Angeles to New York in a few jumps in less than a minute. As a bonus he now had more than twenty different towns to which he could Apparate if he lost control of the situation.

The first thing he did upon arrival in Los Angeles was find a safe-house. He wouldn't be staying there, its sole purpose was to act like one of the Auror safe-houses. To be used only in a dire emergency. If Harry came under attack again he needed a place fixed in his mind as the safe location.

He settled on an abandoned and rather run-down warehouse by the shore. Just in case the place acquired some squatters in the time Harry was in L.A. he made sure that the place he'd be Apparating to was well out of reach of anyone just looking for some shelter.

He then explored the city, dressed up in classic tourist garb and with a pilfered camera in hand. There was a lot to be said for the invisibility afforded by ubiquity. It was not something he'd had much chance to use back in the Wizarding world. It was a rather novel experience.

After learning his lesson in New York Harry approached his every action in L.A. with caution. He was no longer using the many redirection charms in his every-day investigations. Instead he had opted for a more subtle charm that merely made his features hard to describe or remember. It didn't allow him as much freedom of movement as the other, more powerful, concealment charms but it did not influence the reactions of those around him at all.

With the standard concealment set muggles would instinctively avert their gaze and carefully avoid Harry in even busy locations. He thought that those unusual reactions might just have been enough to cue in whoever was looking for him. Perhaps.

We was currently sitting in a tiny café not far from the Stark Industries headquarters. From his window seat he could watch the comings and goings from the carpark, though there was little of value to be gained from _that_ particular surveillance. Stark evidently employed a _lot_ of people.

No, much more worth-while was the fact that this café sold exactly the kind of pretentious, hand-crafted coffee that aspiring young business-types thought made them sophisticated. It made a rather good trade off Stark employees coming and going during their lunch-breaks. There was an almost constant stream of interns rushing through the door with a list in hand, who soon left underneath a precarious tower of cardboard cups.

Harry was looking for a mark, for someone slightly higher up than an intern, someone who may actually _know_ something.

On his second day staking out the café, and fifth day in L.A., as he'd been careful to spread his time at the café out as much as he could bear, he found his man.

Or, rather, he found his woman. Tall, leggy, blonde, she may as well have been wearing a badge proclaiming her to be a trophy secretary. She was joined by a man whom Harry quickly decided would be no use to him, he had the look of a researcher about him.

If muggle researchers were anything like the boffins in the Department of Mysteries then he'd probably have trouble telling Harry who his employer actually was. Such things were simply unimportant to the kind of people who lived in a world of theory and numbers.

It came as no surprise to Harry, as he eavesdropped on the conversation between the two, that the man was living up to Harry's expectations. His awkward flirting was simply _painful_ to listen to. Harry found himself impressed by the girl, apparently named Marcy, the fact that she'd even agreed to what was always going to be a train-wreck of a coffee-date either spoke to commendable open-mindedness or abject stupidity.

As Harry was feeling charitable, he'd decided on the former.

Harry sipped at his cup of coffee, the least pretentious he could find on their menu, while their conversation crashed and burned in a way that reminded Harry of his own early forays into dating.

When, at last, their cups were empty and Marcy had a polite excuse to curtail their 'date', Harry rose to follow them from back towards the Stark compound. As had become his custom since his run-in in New York, his eyes constantly scanned the quiet pavements and nearby buildings for any unduly interested eyes.

When they reached the carpark, fate smiled on Harry at last. Marcy made some kind of excuse to her suitor, who had perhaps offered to walk her back to her desk, and walked quickly towards one of the cars towards the back of the carpark. She bustled around for a moment, making a show of getting something out of the back seat, until she was sure that her admirer was no longer watching, then the stood up, and slouched against the car as she rubbed her face tiredly.

Harry watched quietly from behind one of the ornamental trees that surrounded the Stark Industries buildings. The carpark _was_ guarded, by a single guard at the entrance, and there were a number of CCTV masts dotted across around the area, but he was easily able to avoid them. He didn't need to get into the carpark; he just needed to get close enough. He took a note of the car, and its license plate, before walking slowly back towards the café to await his next opportunity.

It came much later than he'd hoped, but at last, just as the café was closing up for the evening, he saw Marcy's car exit the carpark. He rose quickly from his seat and stepped out into the street, walking quickly to keep her Chevy in sight.

He cast a glance around and ducked behind one of the bushes that lined the road outside of the Stark building. With a pop he apparated to the top of one of the buildings nearer to Marcy's car and began the long process of tailing her. It took him half an hour, and hundreds of short hop apparitions before she finally reached her destination.

It was a block of flats in Anaheim, nice ones too, a recent development. Harry watched from nearby as she pulled her car into her designated spot in the underground lot, marked, helpfully, with her flat number. With another pop he appeared behind a pillar, just meters from her, it was quiet enough that she didn't hear it over the sounds of other cars echoing through the underground space.

He followed her through up the stairs of the apartment building. He didn't really need to, after-all, he already knew which flat she was staying in, but after all the effort he'd gone to so far that day he didn't want to be tripped up by someone parking in the wrong spot.

She lived on the third floor, no great climb, and her flat had the name M. McKinnon, over its letterbox. He waited for her to enter, then waited a little while longer before walking up to her door and rapping smartly on the white-painted door.

"Look, Brad, I'm not—" she said as she threw the door open, a look of exasperation on her face. When she realised it wasn't who she thought it was her eyes widened. "Who are you?"

"Marcy McKinnon?" Harry asked in his best official sounding voice, the one he'd used when conducting investigations when he'd still been on the street. "Do you mind if I have a few words with you?"

"I, uh, sure," she said as she tried to regain her mental balance. He looked into her eyes and was unable to read anything from her, save the blind panic many people felt when confronted unexpectedly by law enforcement. "Wait, sorry, who did you say you were?"

"Sorry, where are my manners," Harry said with a pleasant smile. One thing he'd learned early on in his time as an Auror was that it was not only the bad guys who had guilty consciences. In fact, whenever he met someone who was completely confident when confronted, he knew that they were _definitely_ up to something. "I'm Matthew Montague, I'm with the US Marshals. I have some questions I'm hoping you may be able to help me with. May I come in?"

"Well, sure," said Marcy, not even asking to see any ID. That made things easier. Harry nodded at her and smiled again, he still had it.

"Wonderful, thank you," he said as he stepped into her flat and looked around for where to go next.

"Oh, this way," said Marcy when Harry stopped. She led him into a comfortable sitting room. "Please, have a seat. Would you like anything to drink?"

"No, thank you, this shouldn't take long," he said as he slumped into one of her very squishy chairs. He looked around at her well appointed living room. It was a little spartan for his taste, he'd always felt that a room should be a little messy; it made it feel lived in, and Lily had always been only too happy to oblige him with that particular preference.

"So, how can I help you, officer?" She asked as she carefully sat down in another chair across from Harry's own. She smoothed her pencil skirt down nervously.

"You have nothing to worry about," Harry reassured her. "I'm looking into an organisation called A.I.M., Advanced Idea Mechanics, they've had some dealings with Stark in the past. Do you know anything that might be useful to our investigation?"

"Well… I. I don't know," said Marcy. "I remember something about them. Some guy called… uh… Killium? Right? What are you investigating them for?"

"Killian," said Harry. "There is evidence that his organisation is involved in human trafficking, but I can't tell you any more than that. The purpose of this conversation is just to see how far their tendrils reach. So, you know of the man?"

"Well, yeah, back when I started at Stark he was a bit of a running joke in the office," she said, thoughtfully. "He kept ringing up, every day. He had some idea for a, I don't know, a charity or something? He wanted Mr. Stark's backing for it."

Harry's weak legilimency backed up her words. There were no images of the man, only the sound of his voice and memories of some of the office staff laughing over the man's desperation to reach Stark, whom everyone knew to have an attention span only slightly longer than a goldfish when it came to such issues.

He saw a brief flash in which one of the other girls had commented that Killian might have had better luck if he'd had breasts, a sentiment apparently shared by Marcy.

"And did Mr. Stark give him that backing?" Harry asked, keeping a mental note of Marcy's apparent dislike of her employer.

Marcy very slowly shook her head. "I don't think so?" she half asked. "He stopped ringing not long after I joined. I don't think Mr. Stark ever got back to him."

Harry leaned back in his chair as he felt another avenue of progress rapidly going cold. "So, to your knowledge, there is no connection between Mr. Killian, and Mr. Stark?"

"No," said Marcy, more confidently this time. "Maybe they did speak back then, but I haven't seen anything about that Killian guy in years."

"What about Maya Hansen," said Harry, hoping against hope. "Have you heard the name before?"

"I don't think so," she said, her face apologetic. "It's not familiar."

Harry slumped, close to a week of work and it was starting to look like Stark Industries might be a dead end. His only chance for reliable information would surely be Stark, but the man was being held hostage in some third world dust-bowl.

"Sorry," said Marcy. "Maybe you should ask someone like Pepper?"

"Pepper?" Harry looked up. He saw images of an attractive red-headed lady in Marcy's mind, one that, Harry was surprised to see, she had a healthy respect for.

"Sorry," said Marcy again. "Uh, Virginia Potts? Mr. Stark's personal assistant? There's nothing that Mr. Stark does that she doesn't know about."

"Ah, yes, Miss Potts," said Harry, feigning recognition. He pushed himself to his feet, at least he'd got something out of this day's work. "We have been looking for her, actually. Nothing untoward, just the same reasons I'm talking to you now. Do you have any idea where she may be?"

Marcy frowned, and Harry caught a hint of suspicion on the edge of her thoughts. "Well, Mr. Stane let her go a few weeks ago, when Mr. Stark was taken by those terrorists."

_That_ was certainly unusual behaviour. "What was the reason for her dismissal?" Harry asked. It was unlikely to be important, but his interest was piqued.

"Well, she's not been fired, not really. But she's on 'Paid Notice'," said Marcy, even going so far as to use air-quotes.

So, basically, she'd been fired pending Stark's death. Harry was impressed despite himself, that was _callous_. But while it was strange, it really wasn't applicable to Harry's search.

"Do you think Mr. Stane has had any dealings with Mr. Killian?" He asked. He'd seen Obadiah Stane mentioned in a few of the stories on Stark, but had decided he probably wasn't worth looking into. The man seemed to be as straight-forward as they could come. He shook that off, talking to Stane almost certainly wasn't worth the effort. He wouldn't fall for the government agent act, that much was certain.

Harry stood up, grunting as he did so. "Well, thank you for your time, Miss McKinnon."

"Oh, um, you're welcome," she said, surprised. After a moment she bounced to her feet, relief seeming to radiate from her in waves. "Here, I'll show you out."

Harry smiled, it was clear that there was something going on there, but quite what it could be he had no idea, nor did he especially care. In his experience people could be nervous about the most inconsequential things when talking to an Auror. As if he was going to delay a murder investigation to chase up someone late renewing an Apparition license. "Your mother clearly raised you well."

"Well, manners cost nothing," she said quickly as she walked him to the door. "That's what she always said."

"Indeed, they do not," said Harry as he stepped out of her apartment.

o-o

_Tony Stark, Alive!_

_Late last night the Pentagon announced that Tony Stark has been found alive and in reportedly good health by US military forces in Afghanistan..._

Harry was sat in a greasy spoon eating a very unhealthy breakfast, or that had been the intent, at least. As soon as he'd seen the morning headlines he had spent much more time staring at it in silence. He was fighting the urge to jump out of his seat and punch the air.

Tony Stark was alive. Tony Stark was returning to the U.S. Tony Stark, Harry's one known link to Maya Hansen and maybe Killian too. The first step on Harry's road home.

It would be a few more days until he would be able to organise a meeting with the man, as he'd surely be whisked away to hospital and have to endure days of debriefings from men in suits that are ever so slightly too large for them. Hopefully he'd be able to catch Stark when he returned home, and hopefully that would be soon.

He would have to start watching Stark's place in Malibu. He'd visited once already, and found it to be a godsend as far as infiltration was concerned. The huge bay windows were gaping holes in any perimeter when he could simply Apparate through them. If push came to shove, Harry could always Apparate directly into Stark's bedroom to talk to him.

He folded up the newspaper and returned his attention to his hash browns, though his mind was far away.

o-o

"I fail to see how the insecurity of your installations is in any way _my_ problem," said Wolfgang von Strucker as he picked at his fingernails.

"You didn't say _anything_ about his… his… abilities!" cried Aldrich Killian as he slammed a fist down on the metal desk between them hard enough to leave a deep dent.

"What did you expect?" asked Herr Strucker mildly. "It is Harry Potter, is it not? Why would you think he would not have the ability to perform magic?"

"Because that's not how the world works!" Killian paced back and forth, so red in the face in his anger that he was nearly glowing. "Physics, chemistry, everything is explainable through _science_. Magic _cannot_ exist in a universe governed by our laws."

He stopped and pointed a shaking finger at Strucker, "You knew this would happen. You knew we'd get some kind of _freak_ of nature. This is sabotage, that's what it is!"

Strucker reached up and removed the monocle which he always wore, and started cleaning it on his sleeve. "You have made the mistake of every other scientist," he said without looking up. "You believe that you have a telescope, or a magnifying glass, perhaps, that allows you to inspect the universe, every little bit of it. But like a child playing hide and seek you think that all that you can see with your pitifully inadequate theories is all that there is."

He raised the monocle back to his eye and blinked to refocus on Killian. "You don't for a moment realise that there is so much _more_ in this universe than your small minded philosophy can possibly imagine. There are worlds out there, and worlds within worlds, each as different as it is possible to be. You are blind, and always will be. Your only saving grace is that you were also useful, but it seems even that quality is rapidly diminishing…"

"Are you threatening me?" Killian asked, his fists clenched tight enough to draw blood.

"Yes," said Strucker as he sat back in his chair. "You were given a task, one that is important to us, and you come to me complaining of _sabotage_?"

"You are lucky that your work on Extremis is still useful to us." Strucker steepled his fingers in front of his face. "And that I am not yet willing to reveal my organisation by running around after a children's tale. You will dedicate any resources you have to the search."

Killian growled and for a moment it looked like he might lash out at the other man, but a raised eyebrow held him back. He gritted his teeth. "I will remember this insult, _Herr_ Strucker."

"Good, I would hate to have to repeat the lesson," said Strucker, seemingly oblivious to Killian's bubbling rage. "Now, if you are quite done wasting my time with your requests for me to act the nursemaid, there are other things I need to do."

Killian stepped once towards Strucker, who had immediately turned his attention back to the papers on his desk. He paused, and seemed to think better of taking it any further. He spun around and stormed from the room, slamming the door behind him with such force that both door and handle were left warped and bent.

Strucker raised a finger to his ear. "Someone see to the door. And I want our people to keep an eye out for Potter. They are to take no action unless he notices their presence, but I want to be kept informed of every one of the abilities he is able to manifest. Oh, and see to it that should he fail in his task, that Killian is unable to pass on any information about us."

He nodded to himself when he heard the immediate affirmation in his ear. Really the Potter project had been nothing more than a curiosity when it had been given over to A.I.M. Now, though, it was much more interesting.

The powers Potter had already shown were impressive, though not really anything that could not be done through technology or physical mutations already. What was interesting was the _potential_.


End file.
